There have been many products that address storage performance of the virtual environment, including VSAN from VMware and FVP from PernixData. This post takes a look at comparing these two products, their approach to the issues involved, and their differences.
VMware VSAN moves storage resident in SAN/NAS storage arrays into the hypervisor’s hosts. This storage enjoys a higher throughput, which is further boosted by the use of flash drives. In addition to the greatly enhanced performance, VSAN also provides data protection by specifying the number of copies of the data to be stored. Protection extends to entire host failures, network interfaces, and other critical components as well.
PernixData FVP uses server based flash storage to decouple storage performance and capacity. The storage performance is boosted by the use of PCIe or flash drives attached to each of the hypervisor’s hosts. Capacity can be expanded by the use of inexpensive low-performance drives, which significantly reduces the cost of large storage systems.
Both these products improve storage performance and reliability of VMs while maintaining data consistency across the entire cluster. They integrate with the hypervisor as well, and are useful in many common scenarios. What is the difference between the two?
VSAN has low data efficiency, since it has to maintain multiple copies of the data unlike standard RAID technologies. It is excellent when there is no existing infrastructure, and the data capacity needed is not very high. In case there is a substantial investment in host systems of SAN/NAS storage, FVP is an excellent choice. It also permits data capacity to be scaled out in a cost-effective manner.