VMware Cloud Flex Storage Preview Announced

VMware has announced the preview for VMware Cloud Flex Storage, its new cloud storage and data management service, fully managed by VMware. Addressing the rapid pace of data expansion and heterogeneity and the business requirements for flexible, scalable, and cost-effective ways to store and manage data, VMware Cloud Flex Storage delivers a consistent cross-cloud consumption and management across the entire data lifecycle.

VMware has announced the preview for VMware Cloud Flex Storage, its new cloud storage and data management service, fully managed by VMware. Addressing the rapid pace of data expansion and heterogeneity and the business requirements for flexible, scalable, and cost-effective ways to store and manage data, VMware Cloud Flex Storage delivers a consistent cross-cloud consumption and management across the entire data lifecycle.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage

With an initial focus on delivering a fully managed and natively integrated service for VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Flex Storage will offer a scalable, elastic, and natively integrated storage and data management service delivered with cloud economics. Using VMware Cloud Services Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts and elastically adjust their storage capacity up or down as needed.

Cloud Flex Storage is built on Datrium’s DHCI storage product, an enterprise-class filesystem acquired by VMware in July 2020. This is the same file system used by the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery service.

The filesystem is a two-tier design that allows for independent scaling of storage performance and capacity, using a Log-Structure Filesystem (LFS) design. The combination of LFS and efficient snapshots and immutability makes this a multi-purpose filesystem unlocking many use cases, such as backup, disaster recovery, ransomware protection, and recovery.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage extends this technology to primary storage and the public cloud, delivering storage performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for traditional and modern workloads. You can read more about the filesystem architecture in Sazzala Reddy’s (Chief Technologist and a founder of Datrium) blog here.

VMware Cloud on AWS

For customers looking to use VMware Cloud on AWS, Cloud Flex Storage will deliver true enterprise-class storage, reducing complexity and time-to-value by supporting the lift and shift of virtual machines without the need to rework the data layer or re-architect the storage design.

Considering VMware Cloud on AWS as a data center extension, Cloud Flex Storage provides easy access to additional storage capacity with dynamic scaling of resources. Cloud Flex Storage will address high-performance burst capacity, on-demand scaling for data analytics or cost-effective long-term storage of data repositories in the cloud. Customers are given the choice of keeping their data where it best serves their consumption needs, across their data centers and the public cloud, all managed with a single pane of glass through the VMware vCenter.

Another use case for VMware Cloud on AWS customers is scaling storage-intensive workloads. VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers a disaggregated storage service to independently, seamlessly, and optimally scale the performance and storage capacity to fit every workload individually, whether local instance storage with VMware vSAN or workloads that are storage bound.

How To Apply

VMware is opening early access nominations for this service now. As part of the early access program, they will provide a disaggregated storage solution that allows customers to independently provision and scale storage capacity external to the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC hosts.

If interested in applying for the early access program, please email vmcfs_ea@vmware.com.

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