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Why we must prepare for a quantum impact

Software-defined storage vs NAS/SAN: What are the – Cliff Saran's Enterprise blog

options? Open wearables group buttons down on datasets

– Open Source Insider

We look at the pros and cons of software-defined storage and weigh up when it’s a
better option than buying NAS and SAN pre-built hardware shared storage arrays View All Blogs

By Rene Millman Published: 21 May 2019

Related Content

software-defined storage (SDS)

A lot of suppliers claim to be “market leading” when it comes to software-defined storage (SDS). – SearchStorage

Making sense of the alphabet soup of server-

But to assess those claims, organisations need to understand the technology and what it can do attached ...
– SearchStorage
for them.
Defining the software-defined storage market
– SearchStorage
They also need to know whether network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN)
hardware is actually a better option for their needs.

What is software-defined storage?

In essence, SDS is storage management that uses
software to control the provisioning of data storage
independent of the underlying hardware model, type or
age.

Thus, it has to be completely hardware-agnostic and

run on any hardware platform. It must also be
designed to scale up and avoid bottlenecks. There
should also be a separation of data and control paths.

Another, possibly optional, requirement is to be able to

meet specific storage performance requirements, such
as low latency, high input/output per second (IOPS),
high efficiency, or durability.

The technology enables an organisation’s IT

administrators to configure, aggregate and allocate
shared storage resources through a single dashboard.

The benefits of software-defined storage

According to ESG’s 2017 European storage trends survey, almost 60% of organisations have
begun to deploy or are evaluating software-defined storage. Another 21% of organisations are
interested in SDS in the long term. Those that entirely ruled out the idea of software-defined
storage were in the minority.

There are many reasons for organisations to embrace SDS. Among them are more flexibility,
faster and simpler scalability, and improved automation.

SDS systems cans be configured and deployed in virtually any way, with organisations able to
specify the type of hardware, or run them on virtual, cloud or container platforms.

Read more about software-defined storage

The evolution of software-defined storage, from simple software products to those that offer scale-out, hyper-
converged, NVMe, public cloud and container functionality.

The software-defined approach to storage is catching on. However, for now, enterprises prefer preconfigured SDS
products bundled with hardware for easier deployment.

This means that older storage systems can be re-used while enabling centralised data storage
management and the introduction of newer technologies such as data deduplication, compression
and encryption. In a lot of cases, this can be less expensive than buying newer storage hardware
that includes these technologies.

This extends the life of existing storage, evades hardware lock-in and lowers the cost of
ownership. Organisations can choose industry-standard x86 server and disk hardware and
configure storage service options for users. This offers organisations greater flexibility as the
software is decoupled from the underlying hardware.

Why buy SAN or NAS instead?

SAN and NAS hardware can be a better choice when providing dedicated storage for a single
purpose as it allows the storage and software to be more fully integrated and self-contained.

It can also allow organisations to take advantage of native data management software that comes
with the hardware – such as compression, data duplication and encryption – with no additional
costs. If each storage hardware device is managed through its own interface it also eliminates a
single point of failure.

SDS vs SAN or NAS?

When it comes to choosing between SDS and SAN/NAS organisations have to decide on whether
to get a best-of-breed product that will give them more value and potentially higher cost savings,
or alternatively go for the convenience of an all-in-one solution.

The choice for one over the other all comes down to the maturity and size of the IT department. If
your enterprise has a large IT team, it may well go for SDS as it probably has the skills and
experience to support multiple suppliers.

On the other hand, smaller companies may be better

with a single supplier because they don’t have the “The ability to
resources to manage the complexity associated with upgrade software
multiple suppliers. and hardware
separately, combine
Lifecycle and scalability are significant issues with NAS different storage
and SAN. Some suppliers will expect customers to pay devices and
upfront fees for licences and hardware before they leverage
implement a traditional NAS or SAN architecture. The
commodity
customer could also expect to then pay for support and
hardware make SDS
maintenance over the next several years. After that,
the preferred
you can expect to then pay more money for upgraded
solution for
hardware and software.
organisations
Software-defined storage avoids this as it is hardware
undergoing a data
agnostic and will run on any x86 server – so avoiding
volume explosion”
supplier lock-in. SDS also allows the use of existing
hardware, which drastically reduces costs and enables

z
organisations to base buying decisions for each Paul Mercina, Park Place
Technologies
upgrade on business requirements and availability of
products.

However, some would argue that putting SDS on commodity servers can be more of a problem
than expected, so here it can make sense to use equipment from leading storage manufacturers,
with the price tags these suppliers advertise.

Paul Mercina, head of innovation at datacentre services firm Park Place Technologies, says that
over the longer term it’s harder to find use cases where traditional storage trumps SDS.

“The ability to upgrade software and hardware separately, combine different storage devices and
leverage commodity hardware ultimately make SDS the preferred solution for organisations
undergoing a data volume explosion, which is already a near-universal phenomenon in many
industries,” says Mercina.

“As does operating a multiprotocol storage environment, automating storage management

functions, scaling out more efficiently without the traditional data migration headaches, and so on.
It will rapidly become too difficult to keep pace using traditional SAN and NAS systems.”

Key providers: Software-defined storage

Supplier: Datacore

Product: SANsymphony

Speeds and feeds: Fibre Channel (up to 32 Gbps), iSCSI (up to 40 Gbps), and Fibre Channel
over Ethernet (FCoE) via connection to FCoE switch

Drive type and capacities: Any internal drives, external drives, external disk arrays, JBODs,
solid-state disks (SSD), flash memories, and intelligent storage systems supported on Windows
Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 & 2012 R2 may be attached to DataCore nodes

Protocols supported: Standard IP network interfaces for inter-node communications, console

access, and asynchronous remote replication between nodes. Standard IP LAN connections for
file sharing (NAS)

Deployment size (min/max): 1PB (petabyte) per node; 64 nodes per group

Supplier: Dell EMC

Product: ECS EX300

Speeds and feeds: 10GbE front end, 10GbE back end

Drive type and capacities: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB

Protocols supported: TCP/IP

Deployment size (min/max): Unstructured storage up to 1,536TB (terabytes) per rack

Supplier: NetApp

Product: ONTAP Select

Speeds and feeds: Minimum 2x 10Gb Ethernet ports (4-, 6-, 8-nodes)

Drive type and capacities: 8-60 drives

Protocols supported: NFS, SMB/CIFS, iSCSI

Deployment size (min/max): 4-, 6-, or 8-node cluster, Up to 400TB raw per node

Supplier: SUSE

Product: SUSE Enterprise Storage

Speeds and feeds: 10Gb Ethernet (two networks bonded to multiple switches)

Drive type and capacities: All types of disks in JBOD configurations, or local Raid. Disks should
be exclusively used by SUSE Enterprise Storage

Protocols supported: iSCSI, NFS, CIFS/SMB, RBD (Block), RADOS (Object), CephFS (With
multiple active MDS Servers), S3 & Swift

Deployment size (min/max): SUSE Enterprise Storage scales to exabytes of data and maximum
number of nodes is only limited by the network topology

Supplier: Veritas

Product: Veritas Access 3340

Speeds and feeds: 14x 1Gb Ethernet, 4x 10Gb Ethernet

Drive type and capacities: N/A

Protocols supported: Amazon S3, CIFS, NFS, SMB for file and object access, and iSCSI

Deployment size (min/max): starts at 700TB of usable capacity and scales to 2.8PB

Supplier: Nexenta

Product: NexentaStor

Speeds and feeds: N/A

Drive type and capacities: All-flash, hybrid, all-disk pools Raid 10, N+1, N+2, N+3

Protocols supported: File: NFS 3.1, NFS 4, SMB 2.1, SMB 3 Block: Fibre Channel, iSCSI

Deployment size (min/max): N/A

m Read more on Virtualisation software

network-attached Enterprise demand Software-defined
storage (NAS) drives hike in storage storage benefits to
sales, says IDC sway SDS holdouts

By: Margaret Rouse By: Christophe Bardy By: John Edwards

Storage briefing: The evolution of software-defined

storage

By: Chris Evans

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Oldest 5

[-] vxrackguy - 28 May 2019 12:02 PM

t
Don't forget VxFlexOS from DellEMC As well:
Supplier: DellEMC
Product: VxFlexOS
Speeds and feeds: 6x 25Gb Ethernet, 4x 100Gb Ethernet and more
Drive type and capacities: HDD, SSD, NVMe
Protocols supported: Block Storage
Deployment size (min/max): starts at 20TB of usable capacity and scales to 16PB in a single cluster

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