VMware Announces Virtual SAN Customers

VMware, Inc. announced that Amway Corp., iGov Technologies Inc. and SugarCreek Packing Co. have implemented VMware Virtual SAN, the hyper-converged solution with more than 5,000 customers.¹

Amway HQs in Ada, MI

Year over year, the VMware Virtual SAN customer base has grown 200%.²

Amway, iGov and SugarCreek are running VMware Virtual SAN in support of enterprise business critical applications and VDI. These customers are taking advantage of the cloud-like flexibility and simplicity of Virtual SAN deployed in a hyperconverged form factor that minimizes both capital and operational expenses. VMware Virtual SAN provides shared storage for virtualized production environments with a simple scale-out model that leverages server hardware from every major server provider to deliver lower TCO.

A recent survey of the Virtual SAN customer base found that 64% of respondents³ are running business critical applications. That figure spikes to 81% ⁴ for customers running all-flash systems. According to Gartner, Inc., hyper-converged integrated systems (HCISs) market is forecast to grow from $371.5 million in 2014 to nearly $5 billion by 2019, which represents a 68% CAGR.⁵

Amway Doubles Workload Performance
at  Fraction of the Cost of Traditional Storage
Based in Ada, MI, Amway migrated 300 workloads including application servers and databases running on physical servers and a traditional storage array to VMware Virtual SAN. Beyond cost savings, it doubled the performance of workloads running on VMware Virtual SAN.

“For a long time we have been wanting to virtualize our legacy business systems but limited SAN capacity and high costs of scaling FC storage slowed the execution,” said Jason Montgomery, senior systems engineer, Amway. “Virtual SAN finally allowed us to virtualize quickly, and with a significant cost savings.“

iGov Technologies Delivers Smaller, Lighter Tactical Computing Solution
Headquartered in Reston, VA., iGov is an employee-owned systems integrator and VAR, specializing in delivering mission-centric C4I solutions to its government customers. Following a request from a US government customer to design and build a more portable version of their tactical C2 solution, iGov turned to VMware Virtual SAN and its shared storage capabilities to fulfill that request. iGov’s smaller, lighter tactical computing system has completed developmental testing.

“iGov took a hyperconverged infrastructure approach using VMware Virtual SAN with server-side storage subsequently reducing the weight by 75%, improving storage performance by 10x and extending battery run time by 7x,” said Mike Tyrrell, iGov’s COO and president. “We expect to move quickly into operational testing and should begin fielding by the end of this year.“

SugarCreek Takes Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Approach
to New Data Centers
Based in Ohio with six manufacturing facilities throughout the Midwest, SugarCreek is a diversified food manufacturer helping some of the industry’s largest and best-known companies develop brand worthy food solutions. The privately-held company relies on technology in its efforts to be a producer of high quality raw and ready-to-eat foods. It has virtualized its applications and compute environment with vSphere and secured those VMs through micro-segmentation with VMware NSX. SugarCreek is running VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 in production and is taking advantage of features such as ddeduplication, compression and erasure coding as well as running stretched clusters across its two new data centers.

“VMware Virtual SAN’s interoperability with automation and management tools I’m already familiar with was a key selling point,” said Michael Noone, senior system administrator, SugarCreek. “VMware Virtual SAN works with vSphere PowerCLI and VMware vCenter Server which makes management simpler. We’re not a large IT shop and anything that we can do to cut down on time to dig through things or eliminate the need to log in to a different screen makes our lives easier and helps the business run better.“

“We find Virtual SAN is following precisely the same adoption pattern of the early days of ESXi,” said Lee Caswell, VP of products, storage and availability business unit, VMware. “Customers who originally bought into the exciting consolidation benefits of hyper-convergence are quickly expanding their use cases to business-critical applications now that enterprise storage features are fully supported and flash performance is available.“

iGov and SugarCreek are two of several organizations using VMware Virtual SAN scheduled to present at VMworld 2016 US, which will run Aug. 28-Sept. 1 in Las Vegas, NV.

¹ Internal VMware Analysis, July 2016
² Internal VMware Analysis, July 2016
³ VMware, Virtual SAN Customer Survey, July 2016
⁴ VMware, Virtual SAN Customer Survey, July 2016
⁵ Gartner, Research Roundup for Hyper-converged Integrated Systems, April 2016