Regarding virtualization, storage is one of the most challenging components to get right. You want your VMs to have an instant boot time, your applications to be ready to go, and your storage and networking infrastructure to work perfectly together. You’ll need a healthy, well-designed storage architecture to make that happen. 

The hyper-converged infrastructure market is maturing rapidly and a lot of enterprises are looking for solutions to optimize their storage architectures and increase operational efficiency. So what are the best features of StarWind vSAN, and how do they improve storage and security?

Features for Better Storage

For virtualized data stores, the foundation is a virtualization management system (VMS), which acts as a manager for the hosts and the storage. Like other storage solutions, vSAN was designed to be easy to deploy and manage data. It supports both open source (e.g., Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and Open Storage Environment (OSE)) and proprietary solutions (e.g., vCenter Server). 

vSAN supports all of the standard features of a storage virtualization solution. In addition, it supports storage virtualization by allowing storage to be provisioned in virtual machines. You can make your data secure by separating them from the virtual servers, which has many benefits. You can better manage your storage to help your business grow and improve the performance of your data center. Proper planning can increase your data center efficiency while saving money and reducing your reliance on physical resources.

Here are some of the key features of vSAN that improve storage for your business.

Storage Pooling

The first feature that you’ll notice is pooling. With pooling, you can create storage pools comprised of one or more physical or virtual servers. These pools are virtual storage devices you can assign to other physical and virtual servers. This makes managing storage much easier, especially when managing numerous hosts and storage devices’ creation, deployment, and handling.

Depending on the license tier, vSAN can support a myriad of hosts and large volumes of storage capacity. For example, you could create a pool of storage for your VMs, making managing and optimizing storage much easier. You could then connect this pool to your applications, which will help improve performance, making sure all your virtual servers have access to all the storage they need.

Improved Performance

Using pooling, you can create virtual storage pools to increase performance. You can create pools that utilize the best servers for your needs and improve performance. This increases the performance of virtual servers that access data on this pool. Because of vSAN pool storage, you can save bandwidth and increase data transfer speeds.

Increased Storage Efficiency

With increased pooling and other features, vSAN improves the efficiency of your storage. With the opportunity to create as many pools as needed, you get the flexibility to improve your performance and efficiency significantly. For example, you could have a pool of storage for a virtual server, which you could then connect to your server running Hyper-V or an app running in the cloud.

This way, you could use a pool of local storage to connect a virtual machine running on a server to a cloud app. This can boost the performance of a virtual machine running in the cloud and help reduce data transfer. In addition, you can create as many hosts and storage pools as you need, which gives you the flexibility to maximize your data center and storage.

Storage Replication

Another major feature of vSAN that improves storage is its ability to replicate data. With replication, you can ensure that you have the info you need. With traditional backup, you need to take a snapshot of your data, slowing down operations. Thanks to replication, you can have the data replicated within minutes and take your backups less frequently. This feature will help ensure that your data is always available and backed up. You can also increase the bandwidth of your storage, which can improve your virtualization operations.

Increased Bandwidth

By using replication, you can ensure your data is always available, reducing time and complexity when performing virtual machine migration. By using the replication technology, you can ensure that your info is always available, which makes it easier to back up. The same goes for applications; this way, you’ll always have the most up-to-date data, which you can access from anywhere.

Improved Reliability

Using the replication feature of vSAN, you can ensure that your data is always available and can even help improve the reliability of your system. With replication, you can minimize the impact of any network issues that could cause any data to become inaccessible.

Network Backup

With vSAN, you can back up your data and make sure that your servers, applications, and networks that connect them are backed up. You can configure replication to keep all of your data safe. You can even add a storage location outside your data center, which means you can access your data even if your physical location is offline.

One of the other benefits of vSAN is that you can increase the bandwidth of the storage and improve the speed of your virtual machine, which can help you save money. With replication, you can ensure that you have the most up-to-date data, which you can access from anywhere in the world.

Security in a vSAN

The security of a vSAN has always been on-site. When you use Open Storage Environment (OSE) or Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), there is VMM to manage and deploy your VMs. These management tools are not designed to be a security solution; they’re not an enterprise-class solution to protect your data. However, you can always have these management tools backed up and your data accessible via a cloud provider.

With the addition of vSAN, you’ll have even more security options. With the vSAN appliance, you’ll have the most-advanced virtualization management platform available. vSAN is built with the latest and best technologies and gives you greater data protection. This includes the ability to protect your info with data encryption and ensure that no one, except the data owner, can access it. With the appliance, you can protect your data by encrypting it locally and remotely. You can even create encryption keys for each file you want to encrypt.