Software Defined Storage (SDS): Why Now?
Migratory creatures such as stingrays have an innate response to changes that are reliable indicators of a changing season. Certain changes signal the onset of the migratory season, and more immediate factors, such as water temperature, determine the precise day they will migrate.
Circumstances are signaling to enterprise IT organizations that a change in season is on the way for data center infrastructure, and a few important factors are triggering a mass migration to software defined data centers.
In a typical enterprise data center today, IT organizations are rapidly breaking free from server vendor lock-in with hypervisors, which can virtualize any server using an x86 processor. However, most networking and storage environments remain silos of restrictive and expensive vendor-specific hardware and software.
With software defined data centers, IT organizations are beginning to transform their networking and storage infrastructure from expensive, proprietary, vendor-specific hardware into open-source based software and low-cost, commodity hardware, key factors driving the migration.
Traditional enterprise-class storage can be described simply as file, block and object storage systems including software embedded on expensive, proprietary system controllers, along with server-based storage management software.
Transform both types of software into open source software running on industry-standard servers and commodity storage, and you have software defined storage. This will lie at the heart of a software defined data center, providing a flexible, cost effective, high-performance, highly-available and massively scalable storage environment.
Ceph and SUSE® Enterprise Storage, Powered by Ceph
The best choice for open software defined storage is Ceph, the most popular software defined storage solution for OpenStack based clouds. Using inexpensive commodity off-the-shelf hardware, Ceph extensively scales from tens of terabytes to multi petabytes.
Ceph provides industry-leading storage functionality such as erasure coding for space-efficient resilience and fault tolerance; cache tiering for performance and optimized data placement; a unified block, file and object interface; as well as thin provisioning for capacity optimization. Ceph storage clusters as also self-healing and self-managing, which significantly reduces operational costs.
Powered by Ceph and available as part of SUSE Cloud or as a stand-alone storage solution, SUSE Enterprise Storage is a highly scalable and resilient software based storage solution that enables organizations to build these cost-efficient and highly scalable storage solutions using very cost-effective commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.
SUSE Enterprise Storage customers can have confidence that the enterprise storage solutions they can deploy now and in the future are tightly integrated with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has a long history of delivering leading data storage functionality to enterprise customers.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was first to provide a journaling file system with XFS followed by first to market support for EXT3 and ReiserFS. It was also the first to support a clustered file system with OCSF2. And, most recently, it is the first to market with support for the scalable, copy-on-write, B-tree file system BtrFS. SUSE has over two decades of experience delivering the data integrity enterprise customers demand.
SUSE Enterprise Storage customers benefit from the flexibility to deploy enterprise storage solutions on a wide selection of SUSE-certified, industry-standard hardware platforms combined with best-in-class, worldwide, enterprise, 24x7 support services.
What’s Happening Now and in the Future
With hyperscale and large enterprise companies leading the way, the enterprise storage migration from proprietary hardware-centric products to software defined storage solutions is underway.
Revenue for traditional enterprise storage peaked in 2014 and will gradually decline from this point forward as it is displaced by spending on enterprise software defined storage and hyperscale software defined storage.
In 2015, a catalyst for the acceleration of enterprise adoption of software defined storage will be the general availability of open-source-based software defined storage suites from Linux vendors like SUSE.
Six years from now revenue for enterprise software defined storage will surpass revenue for traditional enterprise storage and become the dominant class of storage through our visible horizon of 2027.
The bottom line is that the general availability of open-source-based, software defined solutions from Linux vendors like SUSE marks the beginning of a new era of much more agile, scalable and cost effective storage. The change has started, and soon SDS will displace the traditional data center.
