Replacing legacy storage solutions with software-defined storage is a critical component of a successful digital transformation strategy. The need for flexibility and scalability pushes many businesses to SDS. Unlike legacy storage options, which are fixed to and limited by their hardware infrastructure, SDS severs the tie between the control plane and the data plane. Uncoupling the administrative platform from the hardware allows for increased efficiency and flexibility, revolutionizing the way organizations manage their storage assets.
Software-Defined Storage
SDS utilizes third-party storage management software, rather than relying solely on the administrative functions provided by the storage hardware infrastructure. With SDS solutions, hardware throughout the organization can be linked together to form a virtual grid. Instead of managing each storage system individually, administrators can address the entire storage grid, even in multi-site businesses and those with off-site appliances.
Grid technology simplifies every aspect of storage administration and management. It allows for increased automation and rapid adaptations as business needs change. SDS makes it easier for organizations to ensure their storage remains secure, to automate storage management policies, to provision storage as needed, and to implement disaster recovery.
SDS offers substantial benefits at a cost-effective price point that is cheaper than traditional storage approaches, both up-front and long-term. With SDS solutions, businesses can save a substantial amount on their storage management expenses without sacrificing capability, capacity, or performance. Organizations must upgrade to SDS if they want to maximize their IT agility, simplify their storage management, and optimize their storage capacity and performance.
Simplified Storage Management
SDS grid technology simplifies storage management and offers substantial savings on time and labor. Traditionally, administrators have been forced to monitor and manage the maintenance and security of each storage system individually. SDS can link all of an organization’s storage environments into a single entity, even those that are massive or off-site. Not only does this streamline administration, but it also allows for greater automation and collaboration. SDS joins previously unconnected appliances, enabling them to work together to overcome complex workflow and application challenges. Automated policies can be developed that recognize and adapt to changing conditions throughout the grid, ensuring efficient storage management with minimal effort.
Optimal Performance
Even top-of-the-line, all-flash arrays, offering sub-millisecond latency and hundreds of thousands of input/output operations per second, cannot compete with the best SDS options in speed and performance. SDS solutions provide the same benefits as high-quality flash arrays but offer higher speeds at equal price points. There is an SDS option to match nearly every performance need and provide optimal speed, scalability, and reliability at a cost-effective premium.
Dynamic and Flexible
SDS can connect workloads to a variety of hardware storage options and capacities, including SATA, NVMe, SSD, and SAS, to meet the requirements for different applications. With this kind of flexibility, organizations can utilize more applications with existing appliances to complete a diverse collection of demanding workloads. SDS systems can also improve provisioning speed, issue response time, and routine resource allocation processes.
SDS users get the features of traditional hardware solutions, such as snapshots, deduplication, and replication, with the unique bonus of a centralized management platform. Technical agility across multiple platforms is also increased, as SDS solutions support both traditional and developing IT consumption models.
Increased Efficiency through Scaling
SDS’s real-time scalability increases efficiency and ensures optimal interactions between workloads and storage options. Workload requirements can change rapidly. SDS can automatically respond and adapt to meet the storage and performance needs of demanding applications and peak usage. Administrators can also access a detailed breakdown of storage infrastructure usage and use this information to further improve operations. Organizations can reduce bottlenecks and downtime without wasting manpower on constant system observation and administration, optimizing productivity, and workload capacity.
Enterprise API Integration
Products like QuantaStor and STORAGE@scale manage enterprise infrastructures using the representational state transfer (REST) interface. The updated and enhanced REST interface now offers more than 200 new operation methods to increase configuration capabilities and provide additional, more efficient resource management. With these new features comes increased data resiliency, provisioning, and availability, making it easier to scale up as needed and balance large loads and peak usage.
Virtualization
SDS’s uncoupling of storage control software from the underlying hardware is achieved by creating a virtual data plane. Most systems will use a traditional hypervisor approach, but other virtualization strategies may also be available. Virtualization creates a separation between applications and IT resources, which automatically provides additional memory, storage, or computing power to each application as needed. The increased flexibility that virtualization offers, allows organizations to simplify their storage management and administration, and access additional resources previously unavailable with their existing hardware.
Cloud Optimized
SDS solutions are fully cloud-optimized, adding an additional level of flexibility and automation. Storage administrators can utilize both local and remote appliances, linking them all together to form a cohesive storage grid. Operations can then be fully automated using API calls, drastically simplifying routine storage administration and management.
Cost-effective
Traditional storage arrays have high, up-front investment costs, and are also expensive to manage. SDS solutions are often compatible with existing hardware and can be used to update older storage systems with more features, eliminating the need to invest in newer, more expensive devices. Storage hardware, from across the organization, can be linked together with SDS increasing storage capacity and taking full advantage of all arrays. SDS even allows storage to be provisioned for virtual machines.
The efficiency and customizability that SDS offers give businesses the opportunity to optimize their storage capacity and management without investing in expensive hardware upgrades. By implementing SDS, organizations can reduce their storage management costs without costly initial investments and disruptive infrastructure updates.
SDS use is becoming more widespread, as it offers significant advantages over legacy proprietary storage arrays. With SDS solutions, organizations can optimize their storage capacity and simplify their storage management at a cost-effective price point. Software-defined storage is highly customizable and scalable, and it offers speed and performance levels that traditional storage arrays cannot match. Businesses from a wide variety of industries are already taking advantage of SDS to manage their data better, and your company could be one of them.
