
Software-Defined Storage (SDS) – the future of data

Digital transformation causes a rapid increase in the amount of data generated. At the same time, the demand for storage capacity is growing rapidly. Traditional solutions such as SAN ( Storage Area Network), NAS (ang. Network-Attached Storage) or DAS (ang. Direct-Attached Storage) have some disadvantages. One of the basic is the increase in the costs of their creation […]
Digital transformation causes a rapid increase in the amount of data generated. At the same time, the demand for storage capacity is growing rapidly. Traditional solutions such as SAN ( Storage Area Network), NAS (ang. Network-Attached Storage) or DAS (ang. Direct-Attached Storage) have some disadvantages. One of the basic is the increase in the costs of their creation and expansion as their capacity increases, and usually a simultaneous decrease in both speed and safety. Software-Defined Storage (program-defined mass memory) – is an example of which is the Ceph ™ project.
Analytical companies such as IDC or Gartner announce a further dynamic increase in generated data. The reason is, among others, Internet of Things (IoT) systems, autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, billions of smartphones and many others. It should be noted that the size of stored data has increased by 5000% in the last 10 years. This increase is a serious challenge for administrators in both management and data security. Is storage a bottleneck in the development of modern solutions and applications? Not necessarily. Technological progress in this matter is very fast and applies to both equipment and software technologies. One of the fruits of this progress that can meet these challenges is Software-Defined Storage.
What is Software-Defined Storage?
Software-Defined Storage is a solution that creates virtual storage systems. Thanks to this, it allows you to separate, de facto, make storage service software independent of the equipment on which it works. This ensures high mobility and better management and control capabilities. SDS also increases flexibility by being able to provide services on servers or in mass storage, or here and here. The software-defined storage environment is free from the limitations of strictly physical systems (e.g. RAID). The resources are simplified, so they can be used more efficiently.
Advantages of Software-Defined Storage
The biggest advantages of Software-Defined Storage are:
- the ability to operate on consumer equipment
- modularity
- failure resistance
- autonomous operation and automatic response to failures
- significant cost reduction
- less need to replace equipment in the event of an update.
A strong feature of Software-Defined Storage is the fact that in the event of a failure of one of the nodes (servers), another node automatically takes over its work. It is quickly configured and resources moved to the pool of the entire system. Equally important, in the case of SDS, theoretically, there are really no restrictions on its scalability. With the right configuration, as the number of nodes increases, the performance of the entire system increases.
An example of a Software-Defined Storage solution social project Ceph ™which we currently support as part of our customer services.
Software-Defined Storage in numbers
A study carried out in 2017 by DataCore showed that global spending on Software-Defined Storage would be steadily increasing. 13% of surveyed companies then declared to allocate 25% of the budget directed to mass storage to SDS. 16% of them were to allocate up to 25% of all available funds for this purpose. The main reasons for implementing this solution in companies are: simplifying the management of different types of memory (55%), willingness to ensure the proper functioning of the environment regardless of technological changes (53%) and the desire to avoid dependence on one supplier (as we wrote above). In turn, the IDC analytical company forecasted that expenditure on Software-Defined Storage will increase by 13.5% every year.
Today, it turns out that although global revenues from storage systems in general have fallen slightly (by 0.6%), the Software-Defined Storage market is indeed still growing, even faster than expected. In 2018, it was valued by Market Research Engine at $ 6.27 billion. What’s more, the company predicts that by 2025 it will already reach $ 31.5 billion, recording CAGR (cumulative annual growth rate) at 29.19%. Transparency Market Research, on the other hand, predicts that by 2027 it will already be 53.6 billion dollars with CAGR of ~ 25%.
It is worth mentioning that the Data Center Group in the third quarter of 2019 in the software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and mass storage segments recorded an increase in revenues by over 40% year on year. Eric Burgener, director at IDC believes that:
„For companies implementing digital transformation, SDS is a useful solution to facilitate increasing the flexibility of the IT system, as well as reducing capital costs due to the possibility of using standard mass storage commonly available on the market ”.