VMware has announced the general availability of its first software-defined storage product- VMware virtual SAN.

The product is built directly into the VMware vSphere kernel which the company said provides its virtual SAN with a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage.

VMware said its software abstracts and pools internal magnetic disks and flash devices from industry-standard x86 servers to produce a high-performance and resilient shared datastore for virtual machines.

According to internal benchmarks VMware Virtual SAN performs 2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a read-only workload on a 32 node cluster and 640,000 IOPS on a mixed workload on a 32 node cluster.

VMware claims its Virtual SAN will simplify storage provisioning and management while reducing total cost of ownership which it said will enable a more agile operational model.

The company said Virtual SAN is easy to configure and deploy, and its integration with VMware vSphere enables its customers to use data services such as backup, cloning, replication and snapshots.