Last week my colleagues had the pleasure to present at Storage Field Day 9 (SFD9). The topic was Virtual SAN, and more specifically what we released with 6.2 and how we are doing from a business point of view / where we stand in the industry. Great explanation by the team on all the different aspects of this release, and even around some of the basic constructs like disk groups etc. One thing that stood out to me, was the explanation of Yanbing around the customer count, I’ve seen one of our competitors screaming shelfware every time they get the chance, which I guess is a great validation to begin with because why worry about something that isn’t a problem to begin with, but still I would like to share this quote:
VSAN has well over 3000 customers. So how did we count these 3000 customers. VSAN’s business is largely build on a transaction based business. Three quarters (75%) of the customers come from the transaction deals. Another quarter (25%) comes from ELA (enterprise license agreements), and most of those customers go through a Proof of Concept with VSAN and they have decided to make that choice. We also have another customer segment which is through the Horizon / VDI use case where we track actual deployments in those use cases.
The intro is by Yanbing Li, General Manager of the Storage and Availability business unit at VMware. Followed by the basics, what’s new and deeper dives by Christos Karamanolis, CTO Storage and Availability at VMware. And last a short demo to show the operational simplicity by Rawlinson Rivera, Principal Architect Storage and Availability at VMware. I created a simple playlist, if you want to skip videos you can do so by clicking those lines top left and select the one you want to view. Thanks Stephen Foskett for capturing and sharing these sessions, awesome job once again!
