VMware, Inc. is stepping it up when it comes to storage. The company announced at VMworld2015 not only the latest version of VSAN (virtual shared storage software) – 6.1 – but a beta version of the next evolution.

Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely, coshots of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked with Charles Fan, SVP and GM of the Storage Group at VMware, during VMworld 2015 to ask about the company’s move into storage and what it offers compared to other players in the field.

Storage announcement

The VSAN 6.1 announcement and beta announcement for the next version of VSAN were two of the major announcements at VMworld2015. Stretch clustering, improved replication, supported deployment and additional features are all a part of the newest release.

What makes VSAN a prime option with such a wide market share so early? “From a technology point of view, underlying VSAN is a distributed object storage system,” according to Fan. “It’s very scalable, not really limited by any numbers. The reason for the actual limit on the number of nods in a cluster is … the reason we believe to do a really good hyper-converge solution you want to have a single control plane with the actual hypervisor you are using.”

Fan went on to talk about the company’s ability to scale.

‘Go wherever vSphere goes’

“As far as vSphere [VMware’s cloud computing virtualization operating system] goes, our customers span from the smallest customers to the largest customers and across multiple industries and across multiple use cases,” explained Fan.

The company’s offerings are accessible for any size need. VMware reports that 60% of its customers use VSAN for mission-critical apps.

To find out more about the announcement, iterations and improvements for VSAN, watch the full interview below. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE