10 Software-Defined Storage Pioneers That Are Shaking Things Up
Tech 10: Software-Defined Storage
A storage array is at its heart a commodity server integrated with an operating system dedicated specifically to providing storage services.
Take away the server, and what's left? Software-defined storage, which is software that can be deployed on choice of hardware, usually from a list of approved servers, to provide storage services similar to those of dedicated storage hardware.
Customers get lower cost and increased flexibility, with the trade-off being the need to do the integration and a potential loss of hardware optimization.
Here are 10 offerings that enable customers to see lower costs and increased flexibility.
DataCore SANsymphony
DataCore, which has never had its own hardware platform, is one of the pioneers in software-defined storage with its SANsymphony offering. SANsymphony provides a common set of enterprise-wide services across isolated storage devices spread across multiple locations to pool the capacity and manage it in a central and uniform fashion. It also provides high availability, asynchronous replication for disaster recovery and continuous data protection.
Dell EMC IsilonSD Edge
Dell EMC Isilon is a leading technology for scale-out NAS deployments, but in cases where a full-fledged Isilon appliance isn’t needed, the software-defined Dell EMC IsilonSD Edge offering is available. Dell EMC IsilonSD Edge runs on industry-standard hardware to give small businesses and remote offices the ability to manage growing amounts of unstructured data, particularly in VMware environments.
Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform
The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform lets businesses build a flexible and efficient data management system built on industry-standard x86 server hardware to support any application, hypervisor, container or cloud. It provides a unified solution for block, file and object storage, and can be customized with a wide range of enterprise storage services.
IBM Spectrum Storage
While IBM still offers hardware-based storage systems, its focus is on IBM Spectrum Storage, a comprehensive suite of software-defined storage applications. Included in the portfolio are such offerings as Spectrum Discover for identifying and cataloging unstructured data as it is created; Spectrum Accelerate for rapid storage deployment on-premises or in the cloud; Spectrum NAS for scale-out storage; Spectrum Scale for big data analytics; and Spectrum Virtualize to unify block storage from over 400 different storage systems.
Kaminario
Kaminario was one of the original startups founded to develop all-flash storage, but in early 2018 shifted its focus from hardware to focus exclusively on software-defined storage while bringing in Tech Data as its preferred K2 flash array hardware integration partner. Meanwhile, its Kaminario Cloud Fabric provides a software-defined infrastructure for enterprise-class, all-flash storage for companies building cloud-scale data centers.
NetApp Ontap Select
This is the software-defined version of NetApp Ontap. Ontap Select deploys on a choice of commodity hardware to turn the server’s existing storage resources into a platform with many of the same benefits offered by dedicated NetApp Ontap arrays. It integrates into cloud management frameworks such as OpenStack and VMware vSphere, and can be used for anything from software development and application testing to building a single server-based data center.
Nexenta NexentaStor
NexentaStor provides full-featured unified file (NFS and SMB) and block (Fibre Channel and iSCSI) storage services, and scales to up to petabytes of capacity. It can be deployed on bare-metal hardware to replace legacy storage appliances or in virtual machines for use in private clouds to provide enterprise-grade file services. Management of multiple NexentaStor deployments is provided by NexentaFusion.
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Red Hat Ceph Storage is a scalable, open, software-defined storage platform based on the open-source Ceph project for implementing object storage into a single distributed cluster with interfaces for object, block and file storage. Red Hat has combined the most stable version of Ceph with a Ceph management platform, deployment utilities, and support services, and is aiming it at cloud infrastructure and web-scale object storage.
Scality Ring
Software-defined Scality Ring object storage enables the deployment of petabyte-scale, data-rich services like web applications, video-on-demand, active archives, compliance archives, and private storage clouds. It deploys on standard x86 servers, and acts as a single, distributed system that scales linearly across thousands of servers, multiple sites, and an unlimited number of objects.
VMware vSAN
VMware vSAN provides a software-defined storage technology primarily for VMwarefocused virtualization and cloud environments, where it creates a single storage pool shared across all hosts in a a vSAN cluster. While vSAN can be purchased as a stand-alone offering, it is usually available either as part of an OEM system vendor’s Ready Nodes, as the storage component of VMware’s VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure, or as part of VMware’s software-defined data center platform.