Cloud Computing: Software-Defined Storage Is Gaining Steam
December 5, 2014
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…
Unlike the cost of storage hardware, which continues to decline on a per-byte basis, the total IT budget involved in running that hardware – and software – often times cannot feasibly grow as fast as the soaring storage requirements for many organizations. That makes automation even more important and key to easing storage management as organizations struggle to do more with less…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2014/12/05/software-defined-storage-is-gaining-steam/