Storage area networks have been a stalwart of organizations’ IT infrastructure for the past three decades. Originally consisting of various interconnected disk arrays, tape libraries, hubs and/or switches, this series of networked storage devices and software stack provides pools of block-based storage to clients and servers with their own file systems.
A decade ago, VMware introduced a virtual SAN, which was a software-based distributed storage system. A vSAN was supposed to eliminate the need for expensive, overpowered storage controllers through software installed the existing servers and use commodity server-class storage media. By virtualizing the SAN environment in such a way, organizations could lower the cost of their storage architectures by leveraging the undeniable price advantages vSANs have over other storage architectures.
