better chance of fitting. By being able to work on top of commodity hardware, a VSAN is often used for building highly available networks across two or more sites that are combined in a single cluster, a type of deployment known as stretched clustering. A VSAN can also create highly available hybrid cloud environments by combining existing on-premises resources with public cloud environments. Advantages The primary advantage of a VSAN is its ability to provide shared storage. It also increases the resiliency of storage systems by allowing the creation of redundant data copies across the servers in a VSAN cluster. It does this while requiring less hardware and power consumption than a physical SAN. Using a VSAN for local storage provides other resiliency options including mirroring or erasure coding with different parity levels. Another advantage is that unlike a typical fabric that is resized switch-by-switch, a VSAN can be resized port-by-port. Similar concepts A VSAN is often associated with hyperconvergence, a concept which refers to unifying computing, networking, and storage resources, within a single server. Similarly, a VSAN shifts away from having a separate physical storage layer and required networking stack, and instead combines storage from multiple nodes into a virtualized and consolidated storage layer. VSANs take control of the storage-related operations, access and features allowing the implementation of data deduplication, data compression, high availability and other features, on commodity x86 server hardware. VSAN is also associated with software-defined storage (SDS). However, VSAN can be also used in converged architectures where VSAN is deployed on dedicated storage nodes as a cluster, and presents the shared storage over a network to compute nodes. See also Storage area network Fibre Channel Fibre Channel fabric VLAN, for analogous mechanism in Ethernet References Computer networks Data management Telecommunications engineering Storage area networks Fibre Channel