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ESG BRIEF
ESG BRIEF
Three Categories of Modern Software-defined Storage
Date: April 2017 Author: Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst
Abstract: The IT industry is currently enjoying a renaissance in enterprise storage technology innovation. While much of
the excitement centers on the rise of all-flash storage, ability to deploy storage intelligence as software offers its own
set of transformational benefits. Software-defined storage (SDS) technologies are changing the manner in which IT
organizations are able to deploy and leverage storage intelligence.
Analysis
At the center of SDS’s potential is its ability to be deployed as software and abstract the underlying hardware infrastructure. While
commonalities exist, it can be difficult to distinguish between the various SDS options, as the industry becomes inundated with a
variety of solutions that leverage the moniker. SDS solutions can be procured as software or as an appliance and reside at the center of
a variety of deployment models including hyperconverged infrastructure and public cloud services. Businesses must understand the
differences between SDS technologies and the benefits they provide. SDS offerings come in a variety of forms, for the sake of simplicity,
we’ll will focus on three main categories of solutions:
• Control Plane-centric SDS: These solutions deploy storage intelligence as software, but predominately do not seek
to replace traditional storage arrays—rather, these solutions seek to virtualize existing storage infrastructure,
possibly both off- and on-premises, while adding incremental features and functionality.
• Hyper-scale SDS: These solutions seek to replace traditional storage arrays. The storage architecture may be block,
file, or object, and may offer any combination of storage protocols, such as FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS/SMB, S3, or HDFS.
These solutions are typically deployed as software on industry-standard, often server, hardware. The resulting
solution is then deployed as an external storage solution leveraging a scale-out architecture. These SDS solutions
are architected as software, but may be procured either as software or as preconfigured appliances.
• Hyperconverged Infrastructure: These solutions also seek to replace traditional storage arrays; however, the
deployment of the storage intelligence and the final configuration leverage a hyperconverged architecture, where
the storage intelligence, the hypervisor, and application software all share the same physical hardware. These SDS
solutions may be deployed as storage software, as storage functionality embedded in the hypervisor software, or
as a hyperconverged appliance.
The Bigger Truth
While the three categories (control place-centric SDS, hyper-scale SDS, and hyperconverged infrastructure) can help provide a guide, it
is important to understand that SDS solutions exist that blur the lines between these SDS solution groupings.
For continued coverage of the software-defined storage market, including technological developments, impacts to IT professionals, and
forecasting, visit ESG’s software-defined storage market landscape page.
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