The competition in the hyperconverged infrastructure market kicked up a notch this morning after VMware Inc. debuted a major new version of its Virtual SAN (vSAN) software for managing server-attached storage. The release promises to increase the amount of data that can be kept on a given machine by up to ten times using a set of capacity-optimization capabilities borrowed from the world of traditional standalone arrays.

The most significant addition is new homegrown deduplication and compression functionality that the company says can reduce the typical enterprise workload to about seventh of its original size right off the bat. Every time a file is committed to permanent storage, vSAN 6.2 checks if there is any overlap with the data that already exists on the host system, filters out the redundant parts and then shrinks the remainder some more for good measure. The catch is that the feature only works if a server relies exclusively on solid-state drives, which can potentially be too expensive for certain applications historically supported using disk.

Organizations that have mechanical storage in their deployments will still, however, be able to take advantage of the other functionality introduced in the new release. Chief among them is support for erasure coding, a data protection method that makes it possible to distribute an important file across multiple machines such that access is maintained even if a node malfunctions. The technique only requires allocating about one megabyte of additional capacity per three being replicated, or about a third of what customers had to provision in vSAN 6.1, according to The Next Platform’s Timothy Prickett Morgan. Administrators can regulate what functionality the software applies to which workloads through new quality-of-service controls that are rolling out in conjunction.

The addition complements the management functionality in vSphere and vCenter Server, the two other components of VMware’s hyperconverged stack. Customers can order servers pre-installed with the software either directly from the company or one of 11 third party hardware vendors. For more details about the new release, check out Wikibon’s exclusive interview with EMC Corp. converged infrastructure boss Chad Sakac below.

Image via VMware