One advantage that Hyper-converged infrastructure(HCI) has over SAN infrastructure is that HCI has put high speed storage back in the hosts. This is also true for Host Side Caching software. However, unlike HCI, host side caching retains the flexibility that SAN infrastructure has over HCI, of being able to do…
Competing with Hyper-Converged
Back when I founded Virtunet in 2010, VMware VSAN had started to effectively compete with SAN arrays. The appeal of hyperconverged infrastructure was obvious, getting rid of a separate storage appliance and having Flash memory right on the VMware host was the highest performing storage configuration. For a small 3-4…
Storage IO path in VSAN and VirtuCache is similar to a large extent since both service storage IO from in-VMware host media. Though with VirtuCache, storage latency is lower than with VSAN for four reasons: Reads are always serviced from local cache media in VirtuCache. In VSAN there is a…