There’s been a serious flurry of news from VMware Inc. in the areas of multicloud, edge computing and artificial intelligence.

Not slacking off in the cloud data storage area, the company has also unveiled vSAN Max, a platform delivering petabyte scale disaggregated storage for all vSphere workloads — with the ability to scale independently from compute and drive down cloud costs while maintaining optimal resource utilization, according to Sazzala Reddy (pictured), chief technology officer of cloud storage data at VMware.

“You can adjust your dimensions, whatever you want — you want cheap and deep? Okay, go for that,” Reddy said. “You want high-performance, large-scale databases? Go for that too — that’s the advantage we saw. And then we did the next thing, which is basically separating out compute and storage. That’s what we are calling vSAN Max. The foundation is similar, except that we are trying to become more flexible in how we offer [to] customers.”

Reddy spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed vSAN Max alongside other accompanying newbies, and how they add value to the larger vSphere ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

Behind vSAN Max’s development

A log-structured file system writes all new information to disk using a sequential structure called the log. The key merit of this system is increased write throughput on optical and magnetic disks. For VMware, harnessing LFS allows it to access larger-scale systems and build out a more multipurpose storage system to address a wider use case pool, according to Reddy.

“We rebuilt some of the layout of that to actually do this log-structured file system,” he explained. “And also it made us become a multi-purpose kind of storage system, because we have many, many use cases we want to address. Once you have this kind of layout, you can scale out you’re software-defined and you can talk to any device you want. You can put many different use cases … because we have this multidimensional scalability of performance capacity.”

Modern applications dictate new approaches to secure storage, and vSAN Max has been designed to meet that requirement by better supporting AI and analytics-related workloads, according to Reddy. There’s also the cybersecurity aspect, where the new system can enable the expedited recovery of data in the event of a breach.

“We are noticing that people have modern, new applications. They’re doing a lot of analytics in this new AI world,” he said. “There’s a lot of data, a lot of analytics. They need large databases. And that’s [why] they want that vSAN Max desegregation of it. And besides that, they also want us to protect against ransomware problems. Protect is the wrong word — recover. How fast can you recover from this? These are innovations we’re doing.”

VMware’s Ransomware Recovery now brings an improved ability to get companies back running in a fast, predictable manner, according to Reddy.

“We’re actually able to recover predictably and fast — we convert these complex things into a workflow with AI-assisted workflow,” he said. “That’s … our ransomware innovations in that. And we want to bring that all to all our storage.“

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore 2023:

(* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE