In the recent years, the concept of storage has evolved greatly. Companies of various industries and sizes are adopting software-defined storage, a revolutionary technology, for their data management. With the help of software-defined storage, companies can make their system related storages flexible and dynamic in nature. But as this technology is new like virtualization, a lot of myths have surrounded it. The IT industry is full of people who have misunderstood the concepts of this storage technology and have not realized its true potential. This technology has a myriad of benefits associated with it that need to be understood before its implementation. So, in order to debunk the myth regarding software-defined storage, we will talk about what it is, what are its benefits and uses. So, without any delay, let us begin this post.
Software-defined Storage (SDS)
Software-defined storage (SDS) is a model in which the software defines characteristics of storage such as application availability, system performance, and architectural resilience. SDS systems are free from the traditional storage related limitations because they are not dependent on the physical storage devices. The main purpose of an SDS system is to establish centralized management in the data center, facilitate effective utilization of resources and easily fulfill data-specific requirements. This model is fully optimized and perfect for software and hardware based interoperability.
Benefits of software-defined storage (SDS)
Listed below are some of the major benefits that come with software-defined storage-based systems.
1. Flexibility: In Software-defined Storage, the majority of the experts have the opinion that flexibility is its main benefit. With the help of SDS systems, one can effectively handle multiple types of workloads. Also, it establishes smart interactions between the storage and available workload. This leads to the dynamic and fast provisioning of storage which in turn improves the firm’s responses towards problems.
2. Agile storage: SDS integrated systems are agile in nature and they support both emerging and traditional IT consumption models. Their agility is spread across all the components of the infrastructure i.e. cloud, social, mobile and analytics, etc.
3. Control with efficiency: SDS is an efficiency-enhancing technology for the ever-changing business requirements. It provides complete control required for effective management of the storage infrastructure and dynamically optimizes all the capabilities.
4. Scalability: Software-defined storage comes with service level tiered capacity and has the ability to provide as per the system’s demands. This creates an optimal and real-time scalable storage which is perfect if your requirements change constantly. It also provides you with powerful analytics that monitors and report accurate usage of storage.
Uses of Software-defined Software
The scenarios in which SDS implementation is a must are listed below:
1. High Availability: If you require high availability of your infrastructure’s resources especially in case of mission-critical data, then SDS can prove to be quite effective. If a server goes down then an SDS system would automatically shift the workload along with data to another node. One product that has this feature is StarWind Virtual SAN. StarWind VSAN creates a storage pool that is highly available by mirroring internal resources between the hypervisors and keeps the data available if something goes south on the node where it was initially stored.
2. Data Migration: Non-disruptive migration of data is every IT administrator’s dream. You can make this dream a reality by deploying software-defined storage. SDS can be used for virtualization of storage volumes on both the new and existing arrays in order to migrate data swiftly among them. The result is a non-disruptive migration in which the applications keep on running and are not aware of the ongoing migrations.
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