Characteristics of Software Defined Storage (SDS)

As with anything in this World, Software Defined Storage (SDS) also has some defined characteristics. Explained in plain English. Software brings intelligence to the IT infrastructure and architecture. On this trend of everything being defined by software – we have talked about Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) before. Now, quite a few storage hardware vendors try to jump up and claim that they actually offer software that they are software-defined Storage. Ultimately, the intended marketing to disguise the actual requirements in today’s data centers and IT infrastructures. Customers should not change their buying behavior, but again more hardware is bought every year. This article analyzes this myth to some extent and explains the Characteristics of Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions for any business.

Characteristics of Software Defined Storage (SDS)

We are reaching an age where computing is defined by software. Characteristics of Software Defined Storage (SDS) could include some or all of the following features described here.

Abstraction is the key behind Software Defined Storage (SDS). Here, in case of Software Defined Storage (SDS), abstraction of logical storage services are deployed. Capabilities from the underlying physical storage systems, and in some cases pooling across multiple different platforms are implemented.
Since the strategy of moving data is relatively expensive and time consuming process when compared to compute and services, pooling approaches sometimes helps the process and create a mapping layer to it the spans arrays.

There should be a working Storage Virtualization System – External-controller based arrays include storage virtualization to manage use and access across the drives within their own pools. Other softwares can independently manage across the arrays and/or server DAS storage. Virtual volumes (Viols) is a proposal from VMware but not a characteristic itself.

Parallel NFS (pNFS) is a specific implementation around Software Defined Storage (SDS), which evolved within the NFS community. OpenStack Swift and Cinder APIs are used for storage interaction for Software Defined Storage (SDS), which have been applied to open source projects but again possibly it can not be a Characteristic.

Some commonly used methodologies and technologies like automation driven storage provisioning with service-level agreements, scale-out storage architecture, hardware with storage logic abstracted into a software layer can be taken as Characteristics of Software Defined Storage (SDS).