VMware Alternative Data Availability

For organizations considering a VMware exit, IT should consider VMware alternative data availability options, which are potentially more critical than lowering license fees. Over-focusing on cost can leave the organization’s data vulnerable. Effective data availability strategies guarantee continuous access to data, even during hardware failures, and minimize downtime, safeguarding productivity and business continuity. Here are key considerations when assessing the data availability capabilities of VMware alternative solutions.

Understanding Data Availability vs. Data Protection

First, differentiate between data availability and data protection. Data availability ensures real-time, uninterrupted access to data despite hardware failures, such as drive, server, or network outages. Conversely, data protection involves recovering data after an incident exceeds availability thresholds, such as widespread infrastructure failures or corruption. A comprehensive solution should address both, but availability demands higher priority due to its immediate impact on operations and higher probability of occurrence.

The Critical Importance of Data Availability in Converged Architectures

Most VMware alternative solutions organizations will evaluate are converged, either hyperconverged or ultraconverged. These converged architectures unify virtualization, storage, and networking onto the same hardware platform. While this consolidation dramatically simplifies management and potentially reduces costs, it increases reliance on the infrastructure’s resiliency capabilities.

In a converged infrastructure, multiple traditionally separated IT functions are merged into a single system, “placing more eggs in one basket.” Therefore, data availability is no longer merely a desirable capability; it becomes essential. Any hardware failure can simultaneously affect compute resources, data storage, and network connectivity. An effective VMware replacement must include robust, integrated data availability features designed explicitly for converged environments to maintain continuous operations, minimize downtime, and avoid disruptions that could impact business productivity.

Evaluate the Efficiency of the Underlying Storage Architecture

The architecture of your chosen VMware alternative plays a significant role in data availability. Solutions integrating storage directly into the infrastructure software can reduce latency and simplify resource management. This integration minimizes the complexity and overhead associated with additional abstraction layers. Conversely, solutions that manage storage through virtualized controller appliances or additional software layers might introduce performance bottlenecks, increased complexity, and higher resource consumption.

Assess Resiliency to Common Failures

A suitable alternative to VMware must handle typical failure scenarios, including single-drive, multi-drive, and entire node failures. Look for solutions providing real-time detection and automatic failover processes, ensuring data access remains uninterrupted. The system should transparently redirect virtual machines (VMs) to alternate data sources with minimal performance impact, preserving user experience and operational continuity during recovery.

Consider the Impact of Data Replication Methods

Examine how the solution manages data replication. Distributed mirroring—creating multiple data copies across different hardware nodes—is fundamental to data availability. However, the method used for distributing replicas impacts normal-state performance and resource efficiency. Solutions leveraging granular, real-time replication across nodes can provide better resilience and faster recovery times than traditional mirroring or erasure coding, which may demand substantial storage overhead.

A typical distributed mirror provides N+1 redundancy, ensuring continuous data availability in case of a single hardware component failure, such as a drive or a node. By contrast, N+2 redundancy protects data even if two hardware components fail simultaneously, maintaining multiple copies of data across separate nodes or devices. While N+1 redundancy requires twice (2X) the original storage capacity, implementing N+2 redundancy increases this requirement to three times (3X) the original storage capacity. However, these capacity overheads can be minimized if the solution incorporates global inline deduplication technology that reduces storage consumption without negatively impacting performance.

Evaluate Failover and VM Placement Strategies

The way your VMware alternative handles VM placement following a node or storage failure is crucial. Optimal solutions dynamically evaluate available resources, intelligently selecting the most suitable nodes in real time, without needing pre-reserved capacities. Conversely, strategies that require significant resource reservation or predefined failover nodes can lead to inefficiencies, increased hardware investments, and added management complexity.

Understand the Network and Storage Protocol Efficiency

Modern storage architectures should efficiently utilize high-speed networks and advanced storage protocols, eliminating the need for data locality, a practice beneficial in slower, legacy environments. Today’s infrastructure, built around NVMe storage, affordable RAM caching, and high-performance networks, renders data locality obsolete. As part of a VMware exit, ensure your new infrastructure software takes full advantage of these modern capabilities, avoiding unnecessary overhead from continuous data migration tasks associated with traditional locality-based solutions.

Evaluate Integration with Backup and Recovery Solutions

Although data availability addresses immediate failure scenarios, eventual catastrophic or logical failures necessitate a strong backup and recovery strategy. Look for VMware alternative platforms that address the need for disaster recovery and long-term data protection, ideally leveraging the real-time or near-real-time copies of data required to meet data availability demands. This integration reduces recovery times and ensures minimal disruption during data restoration processes while lowering costs.

Minimize Management Complexity and Costs

Complex data availability strategies can inflate operational costs, introduce unnecessary complexity, and hinder responsiveness to issues. Evaluate how straightforward and intuitive the solution’s availability features are from an administrative perspective. Effective solutions minimize administrative burden, automate or eliminate recovery processes, and reduce resource overhead, delivering high availability without excessive costs or complicated management tasks.

How VergeOS, VergeFS, and ioGuardian Meet These Requirements

VergeIO’s VergeOS, with its integrated VergeFS file system and the innovative ioGuardian technology, addresses all the abovementioned critical factors. VergeFS’s deep integration within VergeOS eliminates unnecessary software layers and resource-intensive storage controllers, reducing latency and complexity. This streamlined architecture ensures superior performance, maximizing resources for production workloads.

Resiliency is a core strength of VergeOS. The built-in distributed mirroring capability ensures immediate, transparent access to replicated data during single or multi-drive failures. The advanced ioGuardian feature further enhances this capability by maintaining an independent, deduplicated third data copy, dramatically increasing protection against simultaneous node or multi-drive failures beyond conventional N+2 redundancy. In the event of multiple failures, ioGuardian instantly and seamlessly serves data back to production, eliminating downtime and recovery delays.

VergeOS uses intelligent real-time VM placement via its integrated ioOptimize technology, automatically analyzing the optimal node for workload placement during node failures. This predictive placement avoids resource reservation inefficiencies, ensuring maximum resource availability and performance without manual intervention.

Additionally, VergeOS takes advantage of modern NVMe storage, high-speed networking, and efficient RAM-based caching. By eliminating outdated data locality techniques, VergeOS ensures consistently high performance without complex data migrations or associated network congestion.

Finally, VergeOS and ioGuardian provide integrated data protection, seamlessly combining availability and backup functionality. This tight integration reduces complexity, administrative burden, and infrastructure costs, making VergeIO a robust, comprehensive, and cost-effective way to exit VMware.

To complement your understanding of VMware alternative data availability, I invite you to register for the upcoming webinar hosted by VergeIO. This live session will provide practical comparisons between hyperconverged and ultraconverged architectures, discuss real-world performance insights, and help clarify which solution best aligns with your organization’s strategic goals.

Data Availability is just one aspect of assessing the storage capabilities of a VMware Alternative. For more details, read this blog that provides a broader comparison of the storage features of Nutanix and VergeIO.

Conclusion: Selecting for Data Availability Excellence

Evaluating the data availability features of a VMware alternative solution requires careful consideration of storage architecture, replication methodologies, VM failover capabilities, and integration with broader backup strategies. Prioritizing solutions that deliver robust performance, efficient resource use, operational simplicity, and minimized management complexity will ensure sustained availability, reduced downtime, and optimal business continuity, which are critical for today’s dynamic IT environments.