BUSINESSES today are gaining speed in adopting and transforming their data. Companies all over the world are continuously challenged to provide better applications and information-technology (IT) services to a flexible and evolving work force.
Many trends are rising in support of organizations’ demands and goals. One of the solutions seeing significant market traction is software-defined storage (SDS) as the foundation technology for software-defined data centers.
SDS delivers policy-based provisioning and management of data storage through building an automated, hyper-scale storage infrastructure that leverages commodity platforms in support of an overall software-defined environment.
When deployed intelligently, SDS has the potential to be a reliable solution for customers buried under volumes of data. This enables them to choose the best approach for their data center and evolve at a pace that meets their workload needs.
Being in the early stages of adoption, SDS is proving to be popular. For the first time, the International Data Corp. conducted a study that assesses SDS platforms this past year, citing its continuous growth compared to object-based storage market or any other market segment.
Business benefits from SDS include greater flexibility, scalability, automation and efficiency that works best with their data centers. Many organizations are seeking to build a future-ready data center. Being flooded with overflowing data, storage that are fragmented into many moving parts contribute to its complexity and structural challenges.
This is where SDS proves its value by delivering scalable storage based on the infrastructure the customer wants, including cost-effective hardware. It supports organizations in implementing virtualization while balancing between traditional storage and new technologies that recognize their existing Storage Area Network and Network Attached Storage infrastructure.
Maximizing storage as it needs to be, SDS must provide the storage services available on storage hardware—like snapshots, deduplication, replication and thin provisioning—on a software layer that can be deployed on commercial-off-the-shelf servers. The best approach is built on three principles: abstract data from the hardware; integrate storage, compute and networking; and orchestrate through software. The intent is to provide flexible solutions that can be easily added to any environment without ripping and replacing existing infrastructure.
By creating a unified pool of hardware resources and adding automation and monitoring tools, SDS transcends storage virtualization. It moves functions out of the storage appliance and places them close to the data, enabling better load balancing, reducing operational task loads, and improving responsiveness and flexibility. SDS should run on tried-and-tested enterprise-class hardware with the appropriate hardware configurations. Working with a vendor with global services and support is also critical to an enterprise-class SDS implementation.
Customers are relying on flexibility without compromising the quality and reliability of the storage solutions. By leveraging on this, we see SDS enabling businesses utilize private cloud, mobility and Big Data. They could seek vendors that can deliver pretested bundled solutions, appliances and end-to-end reference architectures.
As users opt for newer SDS solutions, they also are looking to evolve their current storage environments. A natural progression is likely to be that traditional storage vendors come to offer more SDS-like benefits while they seek new solutions that bridge traditional IT with new models.
How SDS can succeeds depends on how well organizations abstract and maximize data in the right place at the right time for the right cost. New approaches, technologies and solutions matter but, ultimately, it’s about having to perform with greater functionality and improved service, while providing flexible and cost-effective choices.
****
Christopher Papa is country manager of Dell Inc.’s business in the Philippines.