Software-Defined Storage:

A Buyer’s Guide

Who should read this paper

Software-defined storage (SDS) is a trend that is fast
gaining currency within the IT profession. It seems
vendors and analysts alike are jumping on the SDS
bandwagon each with their own interpretation and
offerings. Regardless of the diversity of choices, IT
managers considering software-defined storage will do
well to adopt a requirements-first approach to decide
upon their path forward. This paper is suitable for IT
leaders responsible for evaluating, recommending and
deciding upon software-defined storage adoption.

September 2015
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 Software-Defined Storage: A Buyer’s Guide
White Paper: Enable The Agile Data Center

Content

Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Step 1: What are your requirements? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Step 2: What results do you want to achieve? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Step 3: What SDS functionality do you really need? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

About Veritas Technologies LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

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Overview

Software-defined storage (SDS) enables organizations to provision and

manage storage independently of hardware types or locations, typically
What is software-defined
because the storage is virtualized in some manner and controlled storage?
through a single interface. With SDS, IT managers have a “virtual pool”
Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
of storage at their disposal, so they can fulfill business requirements in
enables organizations to provision
a flexible, responsive, common way.
and manage storage independently
When you’re looking for an SDS solution, consider its potential of hardware types or locations.
operational and financial benefits. By partnering with an innovative, By identifying and optimizing critical
forward-thinking, and credible SDS vendor that has a strong reputation workloads, SDS delivers:
in storage and software, you’ll realize better gains in availability,
performance, and cost savings. • predictable service levels

• increases storage agility

In this brief, we’ll describe the three main steps to take when evaluating
an SDS solution for your organization including outlining requirements, • better ROI without compromising
understanding what you want to achieve, and determining the on performance and flexibility
functionality that you really need.

The value of SDS is reflected in expectations of significant growth in the SDS market, see Figure 1.

Figure 1. SDS Market Growth Projection

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 Software-Defined Storage: A Buyer’s Guide
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Step 1: What are your requirements?

To find the right SDS solution for your organization, you’ll need to clearly understand your requirements.
Consider these questions:

1. What do you want to achieve with SDS? What are your workload and end user requirements? Do you want to
improve the agility of your overall storage infrastructure? Do you need to improve efficiency by better linking storage
to the rest of the data center?

2. What costs do you want to reduce? SDS usually reduces operating expenditures by improving administrators’
productivity and capital expenditures are lowered through more efficient utilization of proprietary storage systems
and using commodity components to deliver storage services.

3. What storage hardware will be used? Will you be using dissimilar

PERFORMANCE COST
hardware? Note that although physical storage devices are needed
with SDS, you don’t need to think of SDS as a costly rip-and-replace Delivering greater agility and enhanced
endeavor. And dissimilar hardware is not an issue with an SDS quality of service (QoS) for applications,
solution that is vendor and hardware agnostic. while keeping a tight rein on costs.

4. How quickly (or slowly) do you want to implement it? SDS is

easy to implement at the pace that is appropriate for your organization.

5. What common IT processes are time-consuming for your team? SDS often eliminates many manual
IT processes through automation.

6. What are your current and long-term plans for storage growth? SDS can help minimize the cost and
pain of capacity growth.

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Step 2: What results do you want to achieve?

The challenge for many IT managers is how to get started with SDS and which vendor(s) to evaluate. Be sure any SDS
solution you consider can achieve the following operational and financial outcomes:

• Centralized control. With some or all storage resources managed through one interface, you can be far more efficient
with traditionally time-consuming activities such as provisioning, monitoring, change management, and reporting. And,
with the scalability of SDS, you can often manage far more data than traditional storage solutions.

• Lower hardware costs. Rather than purchasing multiple physical storage devices and proprietary software to fulfill
demands for additional capacity and functionality, you can use software to reduce capital expenditures and create the
right mix of storage capabilities on different physical and virtual machines.

• Organizational agility. With many repetitive, labor-intensive tasks performed by the software, data is more readily
accessible and available for go-to-market initiatives. In turn, operating expenditures are reduced because productivity is
often improved.

• Freedom of choice. When storage resources can be accessed and managed with software, organizations are
increasingly free to mix and match vendors and physical assets to meet their changing business requirements. With
SDS, a low-cost commodity device may serve a purpose just as well as a more expensive pre-packaged option.

• Easier, more affordable growth. Every IT organization needs more capacity at some point. SDS can help minimize
the cost and pain of capacity growth in a number of ways:

– Providing the ability to use potentially less-expensive “commodity” hardware, which in turn, gives you greater
freedom to select more cost-effective approaches.

– Supporting a single pool of storage resources, which means the utilization levels of all the component resources
in that pool can be driven higher than a more traditional “archipelago” storage environment.

– Adding resources is easier with standard management and provisioning which, in turn, saves time
and money.

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Step 3: What SDS functionality do you really need?

Software accomplishes many tasks better, faster, and more cost effectively than “throwing hardware at the problem.”
In a nutshell, that’s what SDS can do for storage, but it must be thoughtfully and precisely matched to workload and
end-user requirements.

A guide to evaluating SDS solutions

Use this guide to match your requirements and goals to the specific functionality that can help you reach them.
You can also use this chart to build an RFP for SDS vendors that you plan to evaluate.

Key functionality Why it’s important What to look for in an SDS solution

Hardware and platform agnostic Reduced operational costs and capital An SDS solution should be hardware and
expenditures across storage platforms–no vendor independent so it will support any
matter which vendor you choose. platform you’re currently running or planning
to use in the future.

Storage virtualization Incorporates quality of service while The ability to virtualize back-end storage and
reducing operational costs and capital make it appear as a single pool of capacity
expenditures regardless of the storage by using intelligent software management.
vendor you use.

Quality of service (QoS) for mission Satisfies SLAs and applications’ Granular, online caching to move reads and
critical applications performance without manipulating the writes inside the server that can be enabled
architecture or requiring downtime. Also at the block or file level. Ideally, you can
ensures quality of service at the application achieve up to 400 percent performance
level while optimizing the storage footprint gains while eliminating 80 percent of
through high-performance, in-server storage costs.
storage.

In-server storage capabilities Traditionally, a storage area network (SAN) The ability to combine shared and direct
is needed to provide high availability for attached storage for near-local read and
data, However, when you use direct- write performance to and from remote
attached storage (DAS) instead of a SAN, disks. A “shared-nothing architecture” that
you often can save money and sidestep a lot utilizes DAS can improve read and write
of complexity. performance by 400 percent at only 20
percent of the cost of a traditional SAN.1

Advanced storage capabilities Advanced storage capabilities should Support for storage tiering, dynamic
have the ability to be implemented on any multipathing, thin reclamation, built-in
platform, which reduces costs and simplifies deduplication and compression, and
storage management. embedded cache for flash devices (SSDs).

Storage management automation Allows storage administrators to focus It should centrally manage application,
on higher level tasks rather than fixing server, and storage environments while
immediate problems that often degrade identifying and visualizing potential
SLAs. application and storage problems.

Scalability Application scale out is supported while It should scale storage infrastructure without
delivering optimum performance and data disruption to availability, quality of service, or
integrity. SLA performance. Ideal solutions can mount
up to 64 cluster nodes simultaneously.

Ibid.
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 Software-Defined Storage: A Buyer’s Guide
White Paper: Enable The Agile Data Center

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