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VxRail 8.0.000 - next evolution of vSAN architecture now available with vSAN Express Storage Architecture (vSAN ESA)

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VMware's vSAN OSA and vSAN ESA Since vSAN original storage architecture (OSA) was launched as a software-defined storage product by VMware, it has always been a two-tier architecture constructed of 1 - 5 disk groups - with each disk group then having one tier of dedicated caching devices, looking after the performance of your cluster, and then your second tier having a layer of dedicated capacity drives.               Figure 1.  vSAN OSA                        With vSphere release 8.0, customers will now have another option during cluster deployment for their 3-node, 2-node and stretched VxRail clusters with VMware’s new vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA).  Figure 2. vSAN ESA selection during initial cluster configuration vSAN ESA is a new single-tier architecture where all the drives in your cluster will contribute towards both cache and capacity requirements, with a new log-structured file system that takes advantage of the improved capabilities of modern hardware, driving b
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Amazon takes you anywhere, EKS Anywhere, with Dell Technologies

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With this post, my aim is to give you some insight into our recent partnerships with Amazon that sees Amazon's Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) experience being brought from the public cloud, right into your data centre, with Dell Technologies infrastructure. But before we start looking at the ins and outs of Amazon’s EKS Anywhere offering, let’s first take a look at containers and container orchestration. Containers Microservices and microservices architecture are now the go-to standard for developing modern software. Microservices are where applications and components of a solution are loosely coupled – so if one component goes down, the remaining components can go about their day without being impacted. Containers are built on microservices architecture – with containers providing a standard way of bundling together an application’s code and dependencies into a single object or package. They are isolated, with multiple containers sharing the same Host OS and if required, can al
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PowerFlex Cloud Storage in AWS – a slice of Dell's Project Alpine story

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Introduction With the announcement of Dell’s Project Alpine at DT World in May 2022 ( DT World Project Alpine blog ), there has been lots of chatter and focus on Dell Technologies and their ‘all-in’ multi-cloud journey.   As part of Dell's Multi-cloud by Design approach, Project Alpine will see us bringing our Dell ISG storage software (specifically PowerFlex, PowerStore, PowerScale and ObjectScale) to the three major public clouds - AWS, Azure and GCP. This storage software, traditionally tethered to Dell hardware, will be decoupled from the hardware and moved into the public cloud marketplaces ready for purchase. Ultimately, customers will be able to consume Dell storage by having these virtual storage solutions running on cloud-based infrastructure, think EC2 instances in AWS – with the same look and feel of the on-prem version of your Dell storage solution.   From an operations perspective, Dell’s engineering teams will have done all the grafting behind the scenes porting the
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