Harness the power and flexibility of software defined storage
By Paul Rummery, SecureNet Consulting
Benefits and cost saving of software defined storage
We are pro technology that simplifies, relieves IT administration pressures and enables the business to scale flexibly without constraint - not to mention encouraging centralising and de-siloing data – giving you a better chance of securing, protecting and tracking your data.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Dropbox have become global giants - and their innovative approach to managing massive infrastructure growth has valuable lessons to teach enterprise organisations.
By applying smart software solutions to the challenge of data growth, these famous names have shown that it’s possible to rethink the traditional enterprise block storage model, and create a ‘Software Defined Storage’ platform based on low-cost commodity infrastructure - reducing costs, increasing performance, and delivering virtually limitless scalability.
> SDS, not just marketing spin, but a true IT and business solution for efficiency and cost saving
> If you have already harnessed the power and cost saving of virtualising your server infrastructure, then you will have no problem grasping the concept of SDS / storage virtualization
> Designed to meet the needs of future data centre enablement, transformation and support for next-gen apps
> ‘Software Defined Storage’ approach presents applications, admins and users with a single sharable ‘pool’ of storage
> Elasticity, simplicity, growth, performance, scalability, costs effective – just in time plug and play capability. Flexibility and automation to allow you to focus on growing your business
> Utilised in banking, education, manufacturing, and other large data processing businesses
Accelerate IT capabilities and innovate faster with a flexible software-defined storage solution that’s tailored to your workloads. |
Reduce carbon emissions |
Start small and grow to extreme scale |
Simply add more server nodes to scale out as your needs grow. You can also easily swap out any failed disks or out-dated servers from the cluster - in a simple and cost-effective manner. Working in harmony with a wide range and mix of server brands, operating systems, and storage media (hard drives and flash). |
Scale from 3 to 1000+ nodes |
Dynamically add capacity and scale performance to address changing business needs – much like cloud flexibility |
Reduce server room / data centre footprint (less rack space needed) |
Lower energy costs |
Select any OS or Hypervisor (agnostic) enables managed storage to be shared across more than one type of hypervisor. |
Integrate SAN, NAS and Cloud data sources. |
Eliminate migrations – forever! |
Achieve 6 9s+ availability from SDS |
Delivers automatic 'no touch' failover and failback operation. |
Enables VMware VMs to maintain continuous access to primary storage. |
Utilise and optimise existing IT infrastructure. |
You no longer have to upgrade or replace large SAN storage arrays in an expensive ’tech refresh’ and face complex data migration challenges. |
Infrastructure-Agnostic |
Enables the allocation and sharing of storage assets across all workloads, whether virtualized or not. |
Why Software Defined Storage (SDS)?
Most enterprises find that storage demands are outpacing budgets. Organisations will look to more cost-effective ways to store and manage data.
"The storage market is in the midst of a revolution: SDS has turned legacy storage on its head. This transformation from monolithic, proprietary storage arrays to flexible software-based storage solutions leveraging commodity hardware and the ability to emerge existing technologies into a single platform is a necessary response to the digital transformation and rapid growth of business data everywhere"
IDC forecasts spending on software-defined storage will grow from about $7 billion this year to $9.1 billion in 2019.
Software-defined storage is very cheap (by comparison) – utilise and optimise existing hardware technology and then scale up and out when you need and can afford more – enterprise storage management and efficiency is here now for small, mid and even used by enterprise organisations.
You only need to buy the software, and does not require an appliance or proprietary hardware to be purchased from the same vendor.
Easily scalable shared storage without the expense of dedicated storage hardware. With a comprehensive enterprise-class feature set, built-in high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.
Ideal for businesses who want to simplify general infrastructure management, the ability to deploy storage on-demand, or have remote offices with limited or no IT staff.
This approach enables organisations to scale out quickly, easily and cheaply, adding thousands of nodes over time (each server also adds additional IOPS of storage performance) to provide many petabytes of storage. As hardware components fail, they can be easily swapped out and replaced with new low-cost commodity replacements, with negligible effect on performance. Management of storage in a software defined world also becomes much simpler - with storage provisioned via a simple point-and-click interface in seconds.
The approach also increases storage resiliency, as data can be mirrored across multiple servers - allowing any corrupted or lost data items to be healed or regenerated automatically.
SDS: designed to accelerate application delivery in both traditional and new IT environments
Are you already reaping the benefits of a virtualised / software defined architecture?
Consolidate / reduce the workload of 10 under utilised standalone
servers to only one or two.
Add SDS storage to your already software-defined data centre (virtualised servers, networking and security solutions) automation and orchestration framework, not as a siloed platform.
Software defined storage can meet any work load, from small business to enterprise data processing
Make your IT operations, data mining, management more efficient and reduce overall TCO
Diagram: The Evolution of Data Centre Storage
Software Defined Storage Benefits
Cost Effective SDS
Capex - Improve capital expense (capex) by allowing a storage system to be deployed on lower-cost, industry-standard hardware.
For example, infrastructure SDS products may allow enterprises to deploy a storage-as-software package on x86 server hardware, converting it to a storage system that can be accessible by file, block or object storage protocols.
Opex - interacts with existing storage systems to deliver greater agility of storage services. Management SDS products enable abstraction, mobility, virtualization, SRM and I/O optimization of storage resources. The goal is to improve operating expense (opex) by requiring less administrative effort.
Add what you need by per node, rather than needing to invest in monolithic frameworks
For those who want the Rolls Royce, Starship Enterprise, trial blazing performance that destroys the competition and looks great in your datacentre, then of course, there are more high performing and specialist systems out there – but you’ll pay for them.
Commodity server hardware will become the backbone of software defined storage
In the early days many solutions were built on dedicated appliances. This made more sense when flash was more expensive and storage performance across a pool of servers was less predictable. But appliances can only scale in relatively large increments, and it’s harder for IT to justify new dedicated hardware when commodity servers offer better economics and flexibility, including the chance for IT to re-purpose existing hardware.
How many organisations always have a batch of 3 to 5 year old servers 'sitting on the shelf' at any one time? The compute and memory of these servers is a perfect platform for building software defined storage arrays at a fraction of the cost of physical SANs.
SDS will unlock desktop virtualization opportunities
Storage cost and performance have historically been blockers, especially for smaller scale deployments. SDS enables economical shared storage for desktop virtualisation. For example, customers can finally move away from direct attached storage and benefit from the flexibility of shared storage. Not only that, the ability to fix performance bottlenecks with affordable tiered storage now becomes reality.
SDS Performance
Ultra Fast Response for Critical Applications
Software defined storage to meet any work load
Utilise any storage media: Flash and Hybrid: - Mix and match high performance solid state flash disk storage for primary near-line application and database data, whilst utilising cost effective disks for all other secondary and archive data – all accessible as a single platform for administrators and seamless to end users.
Inherent data management and performance features go beyond disk technology for increase speed, efficiency and reliability.For example;
- Data compression
- Application Acceleration
SDS Resilience
SDS architect delivers true HA due to the automatically synchronised virtual disks that are mirror-protected and presented to different applications spanning multiple campus / site data centres. Each data centre shares critical workloads, yet provides physical separation of storage and compute in the event of a localised data centre outage.
Delivers automatic 'no touch' failover and failback operation.
Enables VMware VMs to maintain continuous access to primary storage.
SDS Data Management
Simplify storage life cycle management from a single administration dashboard.
- Further data storage management features and benefits listed here
Software-Defined Storage Summary
There is no one-size-fits-all software-defined storage solution. So we have partnered with leading storage software providers to jointly engineer agile, open solutions that preserve your business investment and add future flexibility. Choose what is best for you, from pre-validated architectures that remove risk, to hyper-scale solutions.
Data Storage Solutions & Services
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Contact SecureNet Consulting today for solutions advice, engineering, support, professional services and proof of concept resources for software defined data storage.
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 +44(0)7714 209927
+44(0)1273 329753
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 info@securenetconsulting.co.uk |
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