It's hard to believe that 2015 is right around the corner! Of course, this means new forecasts on trends to expect in the new year. I came across an interesting read that I wanted to share: In 2015, ComputerWorld predicts Enterprise investments in storage to increase by 36%. "In 2015 IT will take on an increasingly important role growing revenue, profitability, enhancing competitiveness and getting to know customers. Of these, growing revenue is predicted to be where IT senior management leads line-of-business leaders."
These are trends south of the border but typically in Canada, early adopters will be adopting these trends, while others follow in 12 to 18 months.
What’s important to me in this forecast is finding the right solution to enable Enterprises to reach those objectives. Storage is responsible for the lion’s share of IT spend, growing constantly yet historically resistant to structural change. The exponential and on-going growth in data storage requirements, new cloud environments and increasing analytics applications call for new, more flexible storage management methods. Software-Defined Storage is a new trend that promises to provide the flexibility, service orientation, and cost-efficiency required to address today’s requirements. IDC refers to Software defined storage (SDS) as the delivery of storage services via a software stack that uses commodity hardware. It’s currently seen as a disruptive trend in the industry but one that seems to answer many of the issues seen in data centers today. Let me explain why.
Software-defined data centers have the capabilities required to change how we think about delivering IT services: from static, inflexible and inefficient – to dynamic, agile and optimized.
More business models are now being driven by the need to acquire and harness ever-growing mountains of information. While the costs associated with storage hardware continue to decline, capacity growth is outstripping cost reductions for many. And as volumes grow, storage operational efficiency is attracting more scrutiny as environments move from terabytes to petabytes and beyond.
Why should you care about Software Defined Storage:
Here are some of the major pain points SDS addresses:
- Controlling the costs, resources, and time required for managing increasing amounts of storage
- Need for agile environments to quickly respond to changing workload requirements
- Improving application performance by utilizing storage optimization algorithms to automatically move workloads to the appropriate storage
- Improving and delivering data security, integrity, and availability
- The increasing complexity to support the special needs for Virtual Servers
- Software-defined storage uses application policies to create a “just-in-time” model for storage service delivery. At its core, the concept of software-defined storage refers to software applications layered on server infrastructures to deliver advanced data services, such as snapshots, thin provisioning, and multi-site disaster recovery.
Storage assets and capabilities aren't configured and assigned to specific applications until they’re needed. If the policy changes, the storage environment will dynamically and automatically respond with the new requested service level. The flexibility of software-defined storage will allow for storage environments to easily adapt and change to the performance requirements of the applications, hence delivering substantial cost savings by placing workloads where it makes most sense performance/cost wise. The new concept of software defined storage enables IT departments to deliver easily consumable storage services but with the control, security and reliability of a private cloud.
Advantages of a software defined storage in a data-centric world:
- Faster provisioning. Automation with policy-based storage provisioning
- Dynamic control of service levels. Programmability from a single, central control point
- Simplified operations and troubleshooting. Centralized management across heterogeneous storage
- Flexible resource management. Scalable architecture for exponential growth
- Increased asset utilization. Extensible data services for new capabilities
- Software defined storage is agnostic
- Agility with control
Business Benefits
Faster time to value
IT will become the competitive differentiator enabling an organization to react faster to opportunities that present themselves. With data being the intellectual capital of an organization, software defined storage will provide the means to leverage this data to gain competitive advantage. SDS will also minimize repetitive, time-consuming provisioning tasks and will be more agile to get applications and new services up and running. Organizations will be in a better position to respond to changing market conditions.
Increased return on IT spend
Current three-to-five year technology refresh cycles lead to storage purchases being over-configured in anticipation of future needs. Allocation and availability of storage is often unknown in addition to storage being often underutilized. Centralized management facilitates getting a single composite view of the entire storage infrastructure to monitor and report on all storage resources and enabling predictive analytics to better plan and manage storage purchases.
Innovative Planning
IT staff will have more time by being freed from repetitive tasks fulfilling storage needs for users and will be able to be proactive in planning the right storage for future SLA requirements.
More efficiency
SDS centralizes common storage services for provisioning, monitoring, reporting and authentication across heterogeneous devices. Changes are made to a common software layer instead of individual storage devices where storage can be repurposed to take advantage of new technologies and upgrades. Also, intelligent software balances workloads to minimize performance degradation and outages.
If you’d like Sentia to guide you in finding the right solution to improve storage management and efficiency, contact us at your earliest convenience.
We offer a variety of customizable, complimentary storage assessments that could work as a starting point for your business. Feel free to call me directly at 1-866-610-8489 ext. 313 or drop me a line
here to get a conversation started.
Carrie Lau
Storage Solutions Architect
Be sure to check out our additional Storage assets:
View Sentia's
Doodle on our Storage Solutions Offerings
View our
Storage Briefing Centre for additional videos, whitepapers, and more.