I’ve just found out that I’ve been selected to be a vSAN vExpert again this year which was great news indeed. The complete list of vSAN vExperts 2018 can be found at https://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2018/06/vexpert-vsan-2018-announcement.html
vSAN vExpert programme is a sub programme of the wider VMware vExpert programme where out of those already selected vExperts, people who have shown specific speciality and thought leadership around vSAN & related Hyper-Converged technologies are being recognised specifically for their efforts. vSAN vExpert programme only started back in 2016 and while I missed out during the first year, I was also a vSAN vExpert in 2017 too so it’s quite nice to have been selected again for 2018.
As a part of the vSAN vExpert program, selected members typically are entitled to a number of benefits such as NFR license keys for full vSAN suite for lab and demo purposes, access to vSAN product management team at VMware, exclusive webinars & NDA meetings, access to preview builds of the new software and also get a chance to provide feedback to the product management team on behalf of our clients which is great for me as technologist working in the channel.
I have been a big advocate of Software Defined everything for about 15 years now as, they way I saw it, the power in most technologies are often derived from software. Public cloud is the biggest testament for this we can see today. So when HCI became a “thing”, I was naturally a big promoter of the concept and realistically, the Software Defined Storage (SDS) which made HCI what it is, was something I’ve always seen the value in. While there are many other SDS tech have started to appear since then, vSAN was always something unique in that it’s more tightly coupled to the underlying hypervisor like no other HCI / SDS solution and this architectural difference was the main reason why I’ve always liked and therefore promoted the vSAN technology from beta days. Well, vSAN revenue numbers have grown massively for VMware since its first launch with vSAN 5.5 and now, the vSAN business unit within VMware is a self sufficient business in its own right. Since I am fortunate to be working for a VMware solutions provider partner here in the UK, I have seen first hand the number of vSAN solutions we’ve sold to our own customers have grown over 900% year on year between 2016 and 2017 which fully aligns with wider industry adoption of vSAN as a preferred storage option for most vSphere solutions.
This will only likely going to increase and some of the hardware innovation coming down the line such as Storage Class Memory integration and NVMe over Fabric technologies will further enhance the performance and reliability of genuinely distributed software defined storage technologies such as vSAN. So being recognised as a thought leader and a community evangelist for vSAN by VMware is a great honour as I can continue to share my thoughts, updates on the product development with the wider community for other people to benefit from.
So thank you VMware for the honour again this year, and congratulations for all the others who have also been selected to be vSAN vExperts 2018. Keep sharing your knowledge and thought leadership content…!
Chan
