VMware has announced the release of its new VMware vSAN with combined benefits to help customers accelerate their data centre modernisation efforts.

These benefits include hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) security, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and up to 50 percent higher all-flash performance.

The vSAN 6.6 is the sixth generation of VMware’s enterprise-grade native storage for vSphere, a storage platform built for business-critical and cloud-native applications, virtual desktop infrastructure and disaster recovery environments.

vSANVMware’s vSAN version 6.6 is designed to enable customers to evolve their infrastructure with minimal risk, this being through native encryption, robust availability and a wide choice of hardware platforms like flash technologies such as Intel Optane SSDs.

The HCI security includes a software-defined encryption solution, which features simplified key management that is built to protect against unwanted access to data. Also with included vSAN management, there is added monitoring of the platform when vCenter Server is offline.

Read more: Kaspersky targets VMware NSX security for software defined data centres

According to VMware, HCI solutions that are powered by vSAN have been positioned to help IT team modernise data centre infrastructure despite any shrinking or static budgets. This is also said to work to meet the increasing demands of businesses and end users.

Yanbing Li, SVP and GM, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware said: “VMware vSAN 6.6 is packed with innovations featuring several industry firsts, and will further drive mainstream adoption of HCI by helping customers modernise their  data centres to gain a competitive edge through newfound agility.”

This includes Stretched Clusters with local protection, which can be deployed for up to 50 percent less than traditional storage solutions, a new analytics framework from its Cloud Analytics for real-time support notifications, and automated hardware maintenance.

The addition of faster flash performance will assist the flash performance of business-critical and cloud-native applications by adding a boost of up to 50 percent.

In essence, the new release will provide customers with an efficient, non-disruptive path to a more secure infrastructure that is highly available for their business workloads.