Use case driven technology adoption tends to drive faster and more measurable business outcomes in today’s rapidly changing technology space. Many times, knowing what technology aligns to a particular set of use cases helps customers and businesses understand the value of a particular technology. It also helps them understand how they can implement and take immediate advantage: to help streamline, operationalize, and expose new business opportunities. Below we have outlined a few use cases that align well to an RDMA enabled vSAN ESA architecture:

1. High-performance computing (HPC) clusters: vSAN ESA with RDMA can be used to build HPC clusters that require high-bandwidth, low-latency storage for large-scale simulations and data processing.
2. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads: vSAN ESA with RDMA can be used to accelerate AI and ML workloads by providing fast data transfer between nodes, enabling faster model fine-tuning and inference.
3. Big data analytics: vSAN ESA with RDMA can be used to build big data analytics platforms that require high-performance storage for processing large datasets.
4. Media and entertainment: vSAN ESA with RDMA can be used to build media and entertainment platforms that require high-performance storage for processing and rendering large media files.

Benefits of VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides significant advantages for low latency workloads. ESA is a storage architecture designed to deliver high performance and efficiency for modern applications, while RDMA is a network technology that enables low latency and high-bandwidth data transfers.

By combining vSAN ESA with RDMA, organizations can achieve significant improvements in storage performance, particularly for latency-sensitive workloads. RDMA enables direct memory access between nodes, bypassing the CPU and reducing the latency associated with traditional network protocols. This results in faster data transfers and improved application performance. Additionally, vSAN ESA provides advanced features such as deduplication, compression, and erasure coding, which help to optimize storage utilization and reduce costs. Overall, the use of vSAN ESA with RDMA provides a powerful solution for organizations seeking to improve the performance and efficiency of their workloads that require lower latency.

Here are some of the advantages of the ESA vSAN architecture that help customers as they move away from the older OSA vSAN architecture:

1. Improved performance: vSAN ESA architecture is designed to leverage the full capabilities of modern hardware, delivering high performance and scalability.

2. Single-tier storage architecture: vSAN ESA uses a single-tier storage architecture, which increases the overall capacity available and narrows the impact of drive failures.
3. Improved compression technique: vSAN ESA uses a new compression technique that is executed on the ESXi host where the virtual machine is running, minimizing CPU and storage writes amplification required and decreasing network traffic.
4. Improved encryption process: vSAN ESA uses a redesigned encryption process that is performed on an ESXi host level before writing data to disks, making less impact on the performance when compared to the OSA.
5. Native snapshots capability: vSAN ESA provides a native snapshot capability that minimizes performance degradation regardless of the number of snapshots taken, using a highly efficient lookup table instead of a traditional chain of base and delta disks.
6. Improved space savings: vSAN ESA uses a patented log-structured file system (vSAN LFS) and an optimized data structure that eliminates the performance/space efficiency trade-off, delivering optimal levels of resilience that are also space efficient while offering the highest levels of performance.
7. Improved capacity: vSAN ESA removes the need for dedicated cache devices, making the capacity of all NVMe drives usable by the vSAN datastore, resulting in increased raw capacity available.
8. Improved reliability: vSAN ESA architecture increases the overall capacity available and narrows the impact of drive failures, resulting in improved reliability.
9. Improved management: vSAN ESA architecture provides a more efficient storage stack that reduces demand for physical resources like CPUs and helps improve the consistency of the performance delivered to the guest VMs, making it easier to manage.
10. Improved space efficiency: vSAN ESA offers improved space efficiency without compromise, storing data resiliently using RAID-5/6 erasure coding with the performance of RAID-1, providing guaranteed levels of space efficiency when storing data resiliently.

In the next section, we will dive deeper into the End-to-End aspects of implementing the stack with details on how to configure your ToRs (Top of Rack Switches) as well as the server and software configurations. The goal is to provide validated deployment guidance to ensure customer success with this best-in-class VMware by Broadcom software and Dell Technologies hardware combination.