Blog by Rory Choudhuri, Product Marketing Director at VMware. He discusses vSAN 6.6 and the HCI conversations partners can start having with stakeholders at all levels

In April, we launched the latest vSAN product update – vSAN 6.6. vSAN is one of the most disruptive technologies in the infrastructure stack. More than 8,000 customers have already chosen to transform their data center, opting to virtualize their storage function and entrust their most important workloads to vSAN. The implementation sees the data centre transformed through a hyper-converged infrastructure, which combines server, storage and network functions, all managed via a software layer to help companies lower TCO, evolve without risk, and scale so they can prepare for any workload. And, of course, for that reason, we want our partners on the journey with us as you sell the solutions to your own customers.

We’ve deliberately developed our vSAN 6.6 kits with both the customer and partner in mind. Four new HCI Kit bundles provide an easy way for customers to get started with HCI – converging physical storage onto industry-standard servers – because they contain all the essential software needed to deploy a software-defined HCI solution. A customer can purchase any of these HCI software kits and deploy it on certified hardware from the server vendor of their choice. This simplifies the purchasing process for our channel partners, giving them a single software SKU for HCI. vSAN really does pose one of the strongest current opportunities for partners. With a HCI environment, the sales cycle tends to be turned around in 90 days. When you consider that a traditional storage solution takes around nine months, that means you can get things up and running far quicker.

What do you need to look out for when having conversations with your customers?
How do you spot the perfect opportunity to start discussing a move to a hyper-converged infrastructure with vSAN 6.6? These are the things to look out for:

1. Budget constraints

Your customer has told you they’re concerned with the amount they are currently spending on storage – and won’t be able to sustain their current spending levels. Yet storage requirements are increasing 50% YoY – something has to change. By simplifying the storage function, vSAN significantly reduces Capex and Opex.

2. Stretched resources and increased management complexity

They’re finding managing infrastructure in siloes not just increasingly complicated, but it’s getting harder to get a true overview of what’s happening across the estate. On top of that, their resources are limited – who has the time to manage silo by silo? Hyper-convergence breaks down these siloes, bringing all infrastructure into one place

3. Their old infrastructure can’t help them evolve quick enough

We all know how quickly businesses need to be able to move to be competitive – are your customers saying that their infrastructures aren’t future-ready and can’t help them scale in time?

4. Put the app in charge

Instead of individually configuring LUNs, and relying on your storage admin/architect, set storage policies for the environment. Let the software run the process, both for day 1 set up and ongoing day 2 management. Put the app in charge – that’s what defines the requirement after all.

vSAN 6.6 readily forms the basis of conversations with a number of stakeholders across the business, but they’re going to want to focus on different things. Here are our tips on the conversations you can lead with different people across your client organizations – and the benefits we see attracting each one.

With the CxO:
“vSAN can help you seamlessly evolve to a secure modern datacenter designed for tomorrow’s IT needs, at half the cost.”

With the IT Director/VP:
“With vSAN, IT spend can instead to go to strategic initiatives that actually meet business demand, rather than paying to keep the lights on.”

With the Infrastructure team
“vSAN offers performance and high resiliency for all types of workloads, including business-critical applications. It also has the bonus of running on the same technologies you’re already familiar with – if you know vSphere, you know vSAN.”

With storage Lead/Admin:
“vSAN 6.6 will let you simplify capacity planning by scaling compute and storage in tandem.”

We’re keen to work with our partners to help them help us make it even more successful. vSAN has recently won three industry awards for being the Product of the Year in this space. With the kits we’ve put together to help partners sell vSAN 6.6, now really is a great opportunity for our channel to get out there and start selling the software.

Want more information on selling vSAN?

• Start with the Partner-Led vSAN Assessment
• Visit Partner Central
• Contact your VMware Partner Specialist at HCIsales@vmware.com or your VMware Distributor

Category: Virtualization

Tags: datacenter, HCI, Hyper converged infrastructure, infrastructure, vSAN