Everything You Need To Know About Software-Defined Storage

Bhagya Vithana
3 min readDec 13, 2020

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Photo by Leisy Vidal on Unsplash

Traditional methods for data storage consist of proprietary software and hardware. But on the other hand, SDS utilizes standard servers to manage storage requests.

Software-defined storage has evolved over the past decade from a specialized technology used by large internet enterprises to a commonly accepted storage approach for an increasing number of applications. Let’s find out what does software-defined storage means?

What Is Software-Defined Storage?

SDS is a software controller that controls your physical storage by virtualizing it. It is a methodology of abstract storage management from the physical devices, which helps the professionals to have better control over the storage features.

Core Features

centrally pooled, separate hardware and fluid storage architecture is the main features behind the SDS principle. It has been designed in a way that loads in a uniform manner with a balance capacity.

The separation of storage hardware from software helps you to maximize your storage space and as a result, You may not need to install more hardware.

Unlike conventional storage systems, software-defined storage systems (SDS) provide dynamic and scalable storage space through virtualization, convergence, and interoperability.

When their premium devices are stressed with the overload, traditional systems have often faced major problems. But SDS has built in a way that loads with a balance capacity in a consistent way.

Use Cases Of SDS

SDS has the ability to support large collections of video files, images, documents, or other objects for serving or streaming to web-based clients.

So, software-defined storage is increasingly used to support active archive applications, and mobile-based clients have defined SDS as a rich media repository.

SDS-designed hardware provides output from both levels of flash and disk storage. Migrating between hardware platforms can be done internally and automatically when highly sensitive HDD and flash storage are combined in the same device.

Rich media repositories, open stack, and operational data are examples of the most widely implemented software-defined storage use cases today.

How Databases Can Benefit From A Software-Defined Storage

Flexibility and decreased cost are the main advantages of SDS. However, realizing the full value of SDS depends on choosing reliable, stable, and SDS-capable high-quality hardware.

SDS is commonly designed to run on any industry-standard or x86 system compared to conventional network-attached storage systems such as network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) systems.

The ability to update software and hardware independently, combine various storage devices, and exploit commodity hardware essentially makes SDS the perfect choice for companies that are experiencing a data volume outbreak, which is already a common circumstance in many industries.

In their scalability, conventional SAN arrays are extremely limited. Even scalable SAN arrays can only scale out to a maximum of around 16 controllers. But software-defined storage has real-time scalability where they can adapt to peak demand for platforms and services.

SDS has been followed by the multi-tenancy principle that cloud storage companies can control the actual costs incurred by an application. So that consumers can be charged by application and by the department, not just for their entire use of storage.

Traditional suppliers of SAN and NAS base their availability on the reliability of their custom hardware, while reliability comes from the software for Software-Based Storage suppliers.

Conclusion

Software-Defined Storage is a fast-growing term that enables data storage software, regardless of the underlying hardware, to handle policy-based provisioning and data storage management.

Using these SDS approaches can carry organizations’ storage strategies into the future and provide the edge IT professionals need to take control of spiraling amounts of data and transactions.

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Bhagya Vithana
Bhagya Vithana

Written by Bhagya Vithana

Software Engineer| Technical Writer| University of Moratuwa| Faculty of Information Technology

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