VMware Announces New Virtual SAN Customers, Shows Rapid Adoption of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) for Mainstream Enterprise Storage

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - August 23, 2016) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced that Amway, iGov Technologies and SugarCreek have implemented VMware Virtual SAN™, the leading hyper-converged solution with more than 5,000 customers. (1) Year over year, the VMware Virtual SAN customer base has grown 200 percent. (2)

Amway, iGov and SugarCreek are running VMware Virtual SAN in support of enterprise business critical applications and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). These customers are taking advantage of the cloud-like flexibility and simplicity of Virtual SAN deployed in a hyper-converged form factor that minimizes both capital and operational expenses. VMware Virtual SAN provides shared storage for virtualized production environments with a simple scale-out model that leverages server hardware from every major server provider to deliver lower total cost of ownership than any enterprise storage solution.

A recent survey of the Virtual SAN customer base found that 64 percent of respondents (3) are now running business critical applications. That figure spikes to 81 percent (4) for customers running all-flash systems. According to Gartner, hyper-converged integrated systems (HCISs) market is forecast to grow from $371.5 million in 2014 to nearly $5 billion by 2019, which represents a 68 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). (5)

Amway Doubles Workload Performance at a Fraction of the Cost of Traditional Storage
Based in Ada, Mich., Amway, the world's No. 1 direct selling business, successfully migrated 300 workloads including application servers and databases running on physical servers and a traditional storage array to VMware Virtual SAN. Beyond cost savings, Amway effectively doubled the performance of workloads running on VMware Virtual SAN.

"For a long time we have been wanting to virtualize our legacy business systems but limited SAN capacity and high costs of scaling fiber channel storage slowed the execution," said Jason Montgomery, senior systems engineer, Amway. "Virtual SAN finally allowed us to virtualize quickly, and with a significant cost savings."

iGov Technologies Delivers Smaller, Lighter Tactical Computing Solution
Headquartered in Reston, Va., iGov is an employee-owned systems integrator and value-added reseller, specializing in delivering mission-centric C4I solutions to its government customers. Following a request from a U.S. government customer to design and build a more portable version of their tactical C2 solution, iGov turned to VMware Virtual SAN and its shared storage capabilities to fulfill that request. iGov's smaller, lighter tactical computing system has successfully completed developmental testing.

"iGov took a hyper-converged infrastructure approach using VMware Virtual SAN with server-side storage subsequently reducing the weight by 75 percent, improving storage performance by 10x and extending battery run time by 7x," said Mike Tyrrell, iGov's COO and President. "We expect to move quickly into operational testing and should begin fielding by the end of this year."

SugarCreek Takes Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Approach to New Data Centers
Based in Ohio with six manufacturing facilities throughout the Midwest, SugarCreek is an innovative, diversified and flexible food manufacturer helping some of the industry's largest and best-known companies develop Brandworthy Food Solutions. The privately held company relies on cutting-edge technology in its efforts to be the leading producer of the highest quality raw and ready-to-eat foods. SugarCreek has virtualized its applications and compute environment with VMware vSphere® and secured those virtual machines through micro-segmentation with VMware NSX®. SugarCreek is running VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 in production and is taking advantage of advanced features such as data deduplication, data compression and erasure coding as well as running stretched clusters across its two new data centers.

"VMware Virtual SAN's interoperability with automation and management tools I'm already familiar with was a key selling point," said Michael Noone, senior system administrator, SugarCreek. "VMware Virtual SAN works with VMware vSphere PowerCLI™ and VMware vCenter Server® which makes management simpler. We're not a large IT shop and anything that we can do to cut down on time to dig through things or eliminate the need to log in to a different screen makes our lives easier and helps the business run better."

Supporting Quote
"We find Virtual SAN is following precisely the same adoption pattern of the early days of ESXi™," said Lee Caswell, vice president of Products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware. "Customers who originally bought into the exciting consolidation benefits of hyper-convergence are quickly expanding their use cases to business-critical applications now that enterprise storage features are fully supported and flash performance is available."

VMware Virtual SAN Customers at VMworld 2016 U.S.
iGov and SugarCreek are just two of several organizations using VMware Virtual SAN scheduled to present at VMworld 2016 U.S., which will run Aug. 28-Sept. 1 in Las Vegas. View the VMworld Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and Storage track to learn more about VMware Virtual SAN customers participating in panels and sessions at the show.

Additional Resources

• Read more about iGov Technologies use of VMware Virtual SAN
• Read about SugarCreek's adoption of SDDC architecture and VMware NSX
• Follow the VMware Virtual Blocks blog
• Read more VMware Virtual SAN customer stories
• Try the VMware Virtual SAN Hands-on Lab
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About VMware
VMware is a leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware's industry-leading virtualization technology, our solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. With 2015 revenues of $6.6 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware, Virtual SAN, vSphere, NSX, PowerCLI, vCenter, vCenter Server and ESXi are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions.

(1) Internal VMware Analysis, July 2016
(2) Internal VMware Analysis, July 2016
(3) VMware, Virtual SAN Customer Survey, July 2016
(4) VMware, Virtual SAN Customer Survey, July 2016
(5) Gartner, "Research Roundup for Hyperconverged Integrated Systems," April 2016

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding the potential growth of the hyper-converged integrated systems market. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are made as of the date of this press release. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risks, uncertainties, changes in condition, significance, value and effect, including but not limited to (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation and the entry of new competitors into industries in which we compete; (iii) VMware's customers' acceptance of and ability to transition to new products and computing strategies; (iv) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technologies; (v) rapid technological changes in the industries in which we compete; (vi) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; (vii) VMware's relationship with EMC Corporation and EMC's ability to control matters requiring stockholder approval, and any changes that Dell may implement following the completion of the Dell-EMC merger, as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including VMware's most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release and are based on current expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.