As outlined in this white paper, vSAN is gaining momentum with service providers, in part because of its ability to simplify and automate time-consuming manual storage tasks and the resulting impact on storage operating costs.

However, VMware Cloud Providers will find that their gains in efficiency and operational overhead vary significantly, based on a number of factors, such as size and complexity of the provider, legacy hardware footprint, scale, cost of resources, and so forth. In this white paper, we have provided examples of how these operational efficiencies can be realized in common practice.

While vSAN reductions in CapEx costs, in most cases, stand to transform traditional storage procurement, we believe that the operational transformations that come about as a result of vSAN have the potential to have a much larger impact with service providers, through reductions in operational or ongoing running costs.

shows the estimated vSAN reduction in the tasks assessed, and the time, effort, and cost of the three scenarios provided in this paper. As shown previously, this leads to a one-third or 33 percent reduction in the annual management (labor) operational costs for the storage infrastructure, based on the sample scenarios.

The reason behind this is that vSAN delivers unmatched simplicity when compared to other traditional mid-range arrays or HCI storage offerings available today. It does this by enabling application workloads to be more efficiently managed, with changes rapidly implemented to meet the requirements of the service provider's consumers. Capacity, performance, or protection levels are all modified on the fly, with just a few clicks. It is this software-defined storage model, which provides a new approach to making better use of storage resources in the virtual environment. This is particularly the case when it comes to VM-centricity combined with an automated approach to policy management. vSphere operational teams gain the ability to handle storage with the same mind-set and in the same way as other vSphere-related tasks.

Based on the time and effort analysis provided in this white paper, vSAN operational costs are significantly less in each of the three scenarios outlined. As a result, this product represents one of the most significant cost saving opportunities for service provider data centers we have seen since the introduction of server virtualization by VMware 15 years ago. The growing adoption of vSAN by service providers signifies that VMware is delivering a competitive storage solution, which can scale, provide the high levels of efficiency and availability demanded by consumers, and not only simplify operations, but also dramatically reduce the time and effort associated with hardware acquisition.

Using the operational time and effort estimates of the three scenarios provided in this paper, we saw a positive task-level impact that ranged from 20x to 45x reductions in operational time and effort. This allows service providers to allocate resources to different task areas, and provide a far greater potential for cross-training of personnel.

We then converted the time and effort metrics into monetary values, and provided a cost comparison between vSAN and a traditional shared storage array. The comparison reflected the potential magnitude of the operational cost savings of vSAN, and its overall impact on storage OpEx, achieved through software-defined storage transformation.

, our assessment suggests an average of 33 percent reduction in cost in monetary terms, thanks to the lower costs associated with reduced time and effort. In other words, vSAN requires only one-third of the management OpEx of traditional storage, based on the scenarios tested. However, this is not just an economic decision, but is also based on the product’s inherent alignment with virtualized and container workloads, and the overall software-defined data center (SDDC) vision.