LAS VEGAS — VMware’s software-defined storage play, vSAN, is moving further into enterprises’ data centers, said Michael Haag, group product marketing manager at VMware.

“We’ve seen it take over, to the point where 65 percent of customers are running their core applications on vSAN,” he said, in a talk with SDxCentral at VMworld 2017.

The company recently completed a customer survey about use cases for vSAN. It found 65 percent are using it for business-critical applications and databases such as SAP, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL. Other top use cases include management infrastructure (44 percent), business continuity and disaster recovery (44 percent), and intelligent edge and remote office/branch office (21 percent).

Customers also run multiple applications on vSAN including virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) like VMware’s Horizon, databases, and Microsoft applications.

The company currently has 10,000 vSAN customers — these include General Motors, Chevron, Honeywell, and Boeing — and the software has seen eight consecutive quarters of 150 percent year-over-year growth.

“There’s this huge run-up of opportunity where we’re seeing customers at a point where they have to do something different in their data centers,” Haag said. “There are all these choices: the cloud choices, DevOps, and thanks to the iPhone the end user expects the data right away. There are all these new pressures on IT, and there’s this static IT budget.”

Software-defined storage (SDS) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) help enterprises address these challenges. SDS is a key component of HCI, which combines scalable compute, networking, and storage in a single system.

Haag said customers choose SDS for several reasons, “but it starts with the lower cost. That’s what grabs people first. It’s a TCO [total cost of ownership] story, not just the fact that you’re shifting away from purpose-built systems to these standard servers.”

In addition to cost benefits, both SDS and HCI simplify infrastructure management. “It really is reducing all the traditional storage pieces and management and collapsing that into something that is really simple and easy to use," he said. "It has this phenomenal capability to scale up and out. It’s really flexible.”