Bursting through to the mainstream in 2012, the last decade has seen VMware’s vSAN carve its place in the hyperconverged infrastructure market. Powered by the company’s Express Storage Architecture, vSAN delivers value by creating and managing storage partitions for virtual machines.

In the past few years, however, vSAN has fallen behind the pace of networking hardware innovation instead of fully leveraging it. That trend is set to change with vSAN 8.0 ESA, as the update promises a thorough overhaul to make networking bottlenecks a thing of the past — as evidenced by the telling result of the recent research commissioned by Dell Technologies Inc.

“Over the last decade, VMware has continued to enhance vSAN; and with this new iteration of vSAN [ESA], they rearchitected how things were done to take advantage of the latest generation hardware technologies,” said Bill Leslie (pictured), director of HCI technical marketing at Dell Technologies. “Of course, Dell is delivering those through PowerEdge and a part of our VxRail platforms in HCI. This testing that we did showcases just how important those newer generation technologies are to the ESA performance levels that you can get to with VxRail and vSAN.”

Leslie spoke with theCUBE Research industry analyst Dave Vellante, during a conversation from SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio outside of Boston. They discussed the journey from the early days of vSAN to the present vSAN 8.0 ESA and the test results as a compelling case for organizations to consider 100 GigE networking to unlock new performance levels and usher in a new era for HCI. (* Disclosure below.)

Testing the waters: 25 GigE vs. 100 GigE

The earliest vSAN iterations assumed the prevalence of hard disk drives and the transition from one-gigabyte to 10-gigabyte networks. The original storage architecture relied heavily on a fast-tier caching layer, akin to traditional storage technologies, with the de-staging of a caching tier often becoming a bottleneck. This led customers to opt for RAID 1 configurations to optimize performance instead of more cost effective RAID 5 or 6.

Fast forward to the present, vSAN ESA represents a paradigm shift, according to Leslie. The new ESA has rearchitected how vSAN operates and aligned it with the latest hardware technologies — a synergy manifested through Dell’s PowerEdge and VxRail platforms.

“What we wanted to do was isolate that network in the testing,” Leslie said. “So, we held everything, constant except for the networking in this testing. It’s the same version of software with VxRail; it’s the same hardware components — we didn’t vary the drives. We only moved the networking from the 25-gig cards to the 100-gig cards just so that we could isolate that down to see what type of differential existed inside the potential of our cluster.”

The meticulous testing sought to keep other variables the same while testing the performance of the new vSAN ESA clusters using 25-GigE and 100-GigE network cards — and the results were nothing short of revelatory. With the 100-GigE configuration, vSAN ESA demonstrated dramatic performance improvements, challenging the theoretical limits imposed by 25-GigE networks, according to Leslie.

Test results: Untapped performance horizons with 100 GigE on vSAN 8.0 ESA

The aforementioned tests covered a spectrum of workloads, including online transactional processing and database simulations, varying block sizes and read-write mixes. Any change in performance observed was directly attributed to the shift in network configuration, according to Leslie.

The data presented a clear picture: The 100-GigE option outperformed its counterpart, showcasing nearly a 50% gain in specific workloads, Leslie added.

“What we see on the 100-gig line … is we’re starting to see performance far exceed the right side on that chart where the performance of the 25-gig networks ended,” he explained. “That’s important because what we see here is a near 50% gain on this particular workload that you get with that hundred-gig networking. That’s untapped potential if you’re not deploying the right networks with vSAN ESA to really harness all of that potential.”

Pivoting over to the economic implications of adopting 100-GigE networks, the long-term benefits far outweigh the increased acquisition costs, according to Leslie. By enabling the use of RAID 6 and leveraging the improved processing capabilities of newer Intel processors, vSAN ESA with 100 GigE showcased a near doubling of overall performance levels. Notably, this performance boost came without changing processors, memory or drives, emphasizing the untapped potential within nodes.

“When you’re able to showcase just how much potential you can unleash with these, you need half the number of nodes in an overall design point. It pays for itself very quickly in that equation,” Leslie said. “Without a doubt, that 100-gig [network] is going to let them take advantage of all of the performance that you want to get out of your VMware and vSAN environments.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Bill Leslie:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE