Onsite virtualisation with Nexsan Unity and Vates VMS

For enterprises seeking sovereign control over their data, the combination of Nexsan Unity enterprise storage and Vates Virtualization Management Stack (VMS) might present an alternative to proprietary virtualisation and storage solutions. The new joint platform is designed for deploying virtualised workloads on-premise or in wholly-owned data centres.

Why consider onsite hosting?

Since the change in political climate in the US, many organisations in Europe and elsewhere are re-evaluating their reliance on US cloud providers. Additionally, data sovereignty – data subject to the laws of the country where it resides or is processed – is increasingly mandated at national level. The strict requirements on how personal and sensitive data is processed and stored can mean keeping data inside an organisation’s infrastructure will grant greater control, plus having data locally makes compliance statements much simpler to document.

The Vates and Nexsan solution uses Vates VMS, a Linux virtualisation platform using the open-source Xen architecture. Vates VMS offers live migration, high availability, snapshots, and centralised management. Nexsan Unity provides storage for file, block, and S3 object workloads, with architecture optimised for heavy workloads, and configurable to various RAID levels.

The advantages for enterprises hosting onsite include the ability to set up bespoke, secure environments, that can make compliance easier and in many cases, reduce the size of the cyber attack surface. Plus, companies get the type of granular control of data and storage that’s sometimes abstracted away by third-party cloud providers.

Depending on workload, an on-premise deployment can offer better cost effectiveness than cloud subscriptions and virtual machine licensing, and the platform would be one considered by escapees from the tightening Broadcom/VMware licensing vice. There’s also always the option to expand and scale the provision, thanks to that open-source basis of the Nexsan+Vates platform.

There are no vendor-specific drivers or middleware required and the solution supports standard iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel. Browser-based management consoles are available for Virtualization (XOA) and storage (Unity Management GUI), and data optimisations include tiering (HDD/SSD to NVMe for example), thin provisioning, and compression on the fly.

Native asynchronous replication and immutable snapshots are available, so local disaster recovery provision may be an ideal use for the platform. It is, however, fast enough to be much more than a second or third archiving mechanism – the companies go to great pains to stress the solution’s speed and efficiency under demanding workloads.

However, having physical infrastructure onsite carries a CAPEX burden (and is one of the reasons cloud services have become so popular). But for organisations with specific need for data onsite, high cloud bills, and the internal skills to support this type of infrastructure, the open and extensible solution from French company Vates and Nexsan may be worth considering.

(Image source: “Container Ship” by jdnx is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)

See also: AWS rolls out new tool to simplify regional cloud planning

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