What key features does vSAN provide for distributed storage?

vSAN, or VMware vSAN, offers several critical features tailored for distributed storage environments, with data replication and auto-recovery being central to its functionality. Data replication ensures that data is duplicated across multiple nodes within a cluster, thus providing high availability and fault tolerance. If one node goes down, the data remains accessible through other nodes, thereby minimizing the risk of data loss.

Auto-recovery complements this by automatically restoring the integrity of the storage environment after a failure occurs. When a node fails, vSAN can autonomously re-stripe the data and recover the lost replicas without manual intervention. This seamless handling of failures streamlines operations and enhances the resilience of the storage system, making it suitable for mission-critical applications.

While other features like data alignment, compression, or visualization certainly add value to storage solutions, they do not directly address the essential functions of maintaining data integrity and availability in distributed systems as effectively as the combination of data replication and auto-recovery.