March 7, 2014

vLab.pro is pleased to announce a successful roll out of our upgraded Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure.

The Problem

vLab.pro used to rely on server based local captive storage services to provide backing storage for our remote lab environment. This presented significant challenges in capacity, performance, reliability and scalability.

As infrastructure experts, the vLab.pro team was well aware of the limitations baked in to our legacy storage architecture. Many commercial solutions are available, but none offered the combination of low cost, compatibility, performance, scalability and reliability that we required - so we decided to build our own!

The Solution

The vLab.pro team put together a custom Storage Area Network solution that provides:

• Network bandwidth 20gb/s to individual servers
• Aggregate network bandwidth of up to 80gb/second to shared SAN storage
• A fully redundant network fabric that can withstand any single component failure
• Multi-tier storage architecture with at least 3 different tiers of storage acceleration
• Full VMware storage compatibility
• Support across VMware vSphere and View 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5
• Full VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). This allows our ESXi hosts to offload storage work directly to the SAN for much higher speed and much lower storage network bandwidth consumption

Cost

Any solution you can't afford is not a solution. The approach we adopted provides all of the features and capabilities of top tier SAN offerings at a small fraction of the price. This will allow us to continue as the price leader in the VMware Lab Rental market without having to increase our prices.