Tech Alert: Five Things You Already Know -- And One Thing You Don't -- About Software-Defined Storage

TORONTO, Sept. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The increasing interest in Software-Defined Storage (SDS) to reduce data center complexity is helping companies increase business agility and realize a better return on investment. But there are additional opportunities for solutions that automate storage to maintain service level objectives as well as unify and extend existing storage systems.

Technology experts at ioFABRIC, provider of unique QoS-driven storage automation, offered several points about maximizing the potential of Software-Defined Storage for reduced cost, increased efficiency, and improved ease-of-use.

Five Things You Already Know About SDS

1. Over 80 percent of your data is inactive.

Runaway data growth is generally not due to active files—the files people create and use to do their jobs day in and day out—but rather inactive files, many of which are used briefly and never accessed again. The expense of expanding the data center to accommodate stale data is unjustifiable, and challenges the economics of all-flash arrays.

With their all-resources-are-created-equal design, many solutions lack the ability to distinguish between active and inactive data and among different media types. There is still a great deal of manual effort needed to maintain active data on high-performance media for fast access, and obsolete data onto inexpensive, higher-capacity media for long-term archive.

2. Storage is still complex, hard to manage, and hard to optimize.

No matter how advanced the SDS solution, it takes time and effort to manage IT resources in distributed networks consisting of flash and hard drives across direct-attached, SAN, NAS, and cloud storage. In many infrastructures, it is typical to see capacity and performance utilization of only 60 percent due to the complexity of these underlying storage resources and the solution's inability to coordinate between resources and workload needs.

While adding new, whiz bang, high-end arrays or cloud storage may solve an immediate problem they create yet another storage silo and existing but underutilized assets are squandered, effectively costing you capacity and performance you've already paid for.

3. Data protection is costly and unreliable.

One way SDS delivers value, ideally, is by eliminating the point solutions required to protect data. However, your data and applications likely have distinctly different requirements for protection and availability.

But first-gen SDS offers one-size-fits-all data protection features which may incur high costs, consume excessive capacity, and maintain unnecessary replicas depending on your needs. Worse, it may not provide sufficient protection levels, risking downtime and inferior service.

4. The annual costs of storing data are increasing.

This fact is particularly galling for two reasons: one, because SDS is supposed to deliver relief from spiraling storage costs; and two, because much of that cost is incurred by adding capacity for the inactive data referred to in point one.

For all its advantages—and they are numerous—not even current SDS can avert the probability that storage operating costs will be five times the initial acquisition cost. This is an inefficient, unsustainable foundation for long-term growth.

5. Storage budgets are not increasing.

Not enough, at least, to keep up. Data growth is outstripping storage budget growth by over 10x, requiring more capacity, more complexity, and making it harder to maintain service levels. Free time and extra staff, of course, are not growing at all.

One Thing You Don't Know About SDS

1. SDS should be application-specific.

The "aha moment" about SDS is that it needs to talk directly to applications in order for storage to deliver the proper service to applications in terms of performance, capacity, and data protection requirements. Without this feature, achieved through RESTful API integration with third-party workflows, SDS cannot adapt and scale dynamically enough to accommodate changes in infrastructure and workloads, and to allow applications to control storage policy directly.

Application-specific SDS ensures Quality of Service (QoS) levels are met for each application's needs. Boosted by heavy automation, the software monitors and optimizes data placement over all available resources to automatically fulfill application requirements on demand. The domino effect is reduced management overhead, more value, and better utilization.

"To unify and simplify, storage needs to fundamentally change, but it needs to do so without creating manual chores like provisioning and migration, without leaving holes in the current infrastructure, without constraining future growth," said Steven Lamb, co-founder and CEO at ioFABRIC. "This is why we have developed storage software with application-specific QoS levels, so admins can define what they need from storage and let the software do the rest, with an eye towards more agility, efficiency, utilization, and extending CapEx and OpEx investments."

ioFABRIC's Vicinity software centrally manages and monitors data placed across diverse resources including flash arrays, direct-attached devices, SAN/NAS, and cloud. Vicinity is licensed by capacity under management as an annual software subscription, with site and perpetual licenses available.

About ioFABRIC
ioFABRIC Inc. was founded in 2013 with an executive team that has worked together for more than twenty years over four successful startup technology companies. ioFABRIC Vicinity is a distinctive Software-Defined Storage Solution that utilizes QoS-based automation to provide a dynamic platform that delivers Storage-as-a-Service across any storage. Vicinity will be sold through ioFABRIC's reseller and distribution channel on a price-for-capacity basis as an annual software subscription. The company is funded by private investors and Real Ventures. For more information, a free trial of Vicinity, or partnership opportunities, visit www.iofabric.com.
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SOURCE ioFABRIC

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