| software focus
Ian Russell,
First Distribution’s
VMware Brand Manager
“These two products are on
the cutting-edge of what
VMware is doing in the industry right now”
Ian Russell, VMware Brand Manager
for First Distribution is enthusiastic
about VMware’s NSX and newly-released VSAN. “These two products
are on the cutting-edge of what VMware is doing in the industry right now”
he says. “NSX brings virtualisation to
your existing network and transforms
network operations and economics,
whilst the recently-released VSAN is
set to shake-up the industry with its
radically simple way to reduce the
total cost of ownership for storage with
vSphere” he adds.
NSX
Choice
Some of the key benefits of VSAN:
The NSX network virtualisation platform operates on any hypervisor, any
network hardware and integrates with
any cloud management platform.
• Radically simple storage designed
for virtual machines
• Hypervisor-converged storage software that creates a high-performance,
persistent storage tier
• Significantly reduced TCO by up to
50 percent
• Integrated with VMware stack
• Flash-optimised architecture for
compelling price/ performance
• Low upfront investment; grow as
you go with granular linear scaling of
performance, capacity, and cost
• Rapid storage provisioning and
automated, self-tuning on-going management
• Single pane of glass management
with vSphere
• Backed by VMware support and all
major server OEMs
Virtualised Network
Similar to a virtual machine for
compute, a virtualised network is a
fully functional network in a software
container, provisioned independent of
underlying hardware or topology.
Distributed Security
NSX delivers a new model for network
security. Security profiles are distributed to and enforced by virtual ports and
move with VMs.
So what exactly does NSX do?
Scale & Performance
Agility
NSX reduces the time it takes to
provision custom, multi-tier network topologies and enterprise class security
services from weeks to seconds.
Cost
NSX reduces both OPEX and CAPEX.
Automation eliminates manual configuration from the network provisioning
process and simplifies network hardware requirements.
NSX is deployed in production today
by several of the largest service providers, global financials and enterprise
data centres in the world.
Virtual SAN (VSAN)
Ian concludes: “I strongly recommend
that both existing and potential new
VMware customers investigate and do
further research into these products,
as they’re the result of large amounts
of R&D by VMware and contain huge
potential. If anyone has any questions,
I’d be more than happy to help.”
Virtual SAN is a new software-defined
storage tier for VMware vSphere environments. Virtual SAN clusters server
disks and flash to create radically simple, high performance, resilient shared
storage designed for virtual machines.
29 | www.firstdistribution.co.za