Cloud Computing: Software-Defined Storage Is Gaining Steam
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Alan Atkinson.
One of the fastest-growing segments of the software-everything universe is software-defined storage (SDS). Vendors new and old – including my company – are busy staking out their claims in this fast-developing market. The basic concept is simple: abstract the storage services (e.g. management, data protection, data placement, I/O, etc.) from the hardware that provides these services. When deployed intelligently, SDS has the potential to be a reliable solution for certain workload and customers large and small. Potential benefits include greater flexibility, scalability, CapEx and OpEx savings, and reduced complexity.
The State of Storage
Enterprise storage today can be fragmented with many moving parts, including different technologies (e.g. SAN, NAS, Flash, Object, etc.), multiple vendors, tools, and management software. Information types are changing too, with structured and unstructured data, rich or complex data, Big Data and the Internet of Things…


Huawei and Red Hat have revealed that they will be entering a partnership with each other to collaborate on OpenStack for Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). OpenStack, the Linux-based open source cloud computing project, has recently received a raft of attention from some of the bigger names in enterprise IT such as EMC, HP, and IBM. Huawei also entered the fray in 2013, and is now firmly flying the OpenStack flag with this latest announcement.