The Economics of Disaggregated Private Cloud Storage

For organizations building private cloud environments, selecting a storage solution is a key decision that can significantly impact the environment’s technical capabilities, operational efficiency, and overall cost. While the current storage landscape provides a range of solutions that provide various technical capabilities, evaluating their operational and economic impact over time can prove to be a challenge for IT decision makers. To assist IT organizations in this process, Signal65 recently developed an economic analysis modeling two distinct approaches to building private clouds with VMware Virtual Cloud Foundation (VCF).

VMware VCF provides a powerful virtualization platform for organizations to build private and hybrid clouds. When deploying VCF, organizations have a choice between utilizing VMware’s own storage solution, vSAN, or utilizing an additional SAN array. Traditionally, vSAN has been offered as a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution, coupling storage and compute resources. While an HCI approach offers many benefits, greater flexibility to scale compute and storage independently can be more economically efficient for certain use cases. In such instances, IT organizations may look to a SAN array to deploy storage separate from their VCF compute environment. Recent enhancements to vSAN, however, have enabled new disaggregated deployment options, providing IT organizations with an additional storage deployment option where this flexibility is needed.

The Signal65 study evaluated the overall economics of a VCF environment deployed with disaggregated vSAN storage compared to the same environment deployed with a leading SAN array. To create an even comparison between storage solutions, the compute environment was kept identical when modeling both solutions. The analysis modeled both environments over a 5-year period and compared costs of hardware, support, licensing fees, and operational costs. Operational costs were calculated using an in-depth analysis of the administrative time and complexity required for each solution.

Key findings from the economic analysis include:

• 30% cost savings over a 5-year period with vSAN
• 76% savings in administrative costs compared to FC SAN
• 70% savings in hardware and support costs compared to FC SAN.
• The vSAN deployment saved $1,090,105 in Year 1.

More details can be found in the full Signal65 Lab Insight report, The Economics of Disaggregated Private Cloud Storage, click the button below to visit the Signal65 website.

In partnership with: