Software Defined Storage (SDS) Solutions

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StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.

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StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.

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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other…

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VMware vSAN

VMware vSAN is an enterprise-class storage virtualization software that provides a simple path to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and multi cloud. VMware vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.

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IBM System Storage DS8900F

IBM System Storage DS8900F is a line of storage appliances.

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SANsymphony

DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and…

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Red Hat Ceph Storage

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a software defined storage option.

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NetApp ONTAP Data Management Software

NetApp's ONTAP Data Management Software is a storage and data management and protection solution. ONTAP 9 allows users to build an intelligent hybrid cloud that is the foundation of a NetApp Data Fabric that spans flash, disk, and cloud. Flexibly deploy storage on a choice of…

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StorPool

StorPool is a block-storage software that uses standard hardware and builds a storage system out of this hardware. It is installed on the servers and creates a shared storage pool from their local drives in these servers. Compared to traditional SANs, all-flash arrays, or other storage…

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IBM Spectrum Scale

IBM Spectrum Scale supports storage management of unstructured data for big data analytics.

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Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS)

Cisco Cloud Object Storage (COS) provides distributed, resilient, high-performance storage and retrieval of binary large object (blob) data. Object storage is distributed across a cluster of hardware systems, or nodes. The storage cluster is resilient against hard drive failure within…

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IBM Elastic Storage Server

IBM Elastic Storage Server (IBM ESS) is a software-defined storage option.

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IBM Storage Fusion

IBM Storage Fusion is the foundation for container-native applications running on Red Hat OpenShift, which provides enterprise grade data-storage and protection services. This solution includes data services that are critical for global enterprise applications and a data driven Red…

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StarWind SAN & NAS

StarWind SAN & NAS is an HCL-certified software-defined shared storage for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The solution also enables the user to repurpose servers into certified backup targets if they are using Veeam. StarWind SAN & NAS, as a Linux-based VM, leverages…

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Scality  ARTESCA

Scality in San Francisco offers scalable file and object storage for media, healthcare, cloud service providers, and others.

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Springpath

Springpath in Sunnyvale, California offers software defined storage.

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Red Hat Gluster Storage

Red Hat Gluster Storage is a software-defined storage option; Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011.

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SUSE Enterprise Storage (discontinued)

SUSE Enterprise Storage was a software defined storage option from SUSE that has been discontinued. SUSE still provides the capabilities of that product with Longhorn Block Storage, acquired with Rancher Labs by SUSE in July 2020.

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Stratoscale Object Storage

Stratoscale offers single-click provisioning and scaling of object storage in a single click to simplify storage-related operations and ensure agility and scalability.

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Dell EMC ViPR
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Dell EMC ViPR Controller is storage automation software that helps organizations reduce management overhead through automation across Dell EMC block architectures. It abstracts and pools resources to deliver automated, policy-driven storage services on demand via a self-service catalog.…

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Amax StorMax SDS

AMAX Information Technologies in Fremont, California offers StorMax SDS, software defined storage.

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Stratoscale Private Cloud Platform (Symphony)

Stratoscale Private Cloud Platform is designed to simplify operational complexity through automated end-to-end infrastructure provisioning of compute, storage and network resources across all enterprise environments.

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Elastifile
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Elastifile, founded in 2013 and headquartered in Santa Clara, provides software to help deploy private and hybrid cloud storage solutions; they define this is a software-defined bring-your-own-hardware storage, and emphasize the elasticity and scalability gained from their software-…

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Vexata Active Data Fabric

Vexata is a data storage infrastructure technology providing exponentially faster transactional and analytics application performance, without tuning, or re-architecting.

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FreeStor
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FalconStor offers FreeStor, the company's flagship software-defined storage (SDS) solution to guide data migration processes, provide business continuity and data recovery, application and workflow tuning and optimization, and core-to-edge analytics.

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OpenIO Object Storage

OpenIO is a software-defined open source object storage solution ideal for Big Data, HPC and AI. With its distributed grid architecture and self-learning ConsciousGrid™ technology, OpenIO scales instantly without mandatory data rebalancing, while delivering consistent high performance.…

Learn More About Software Defined Storage (SDS) Solutions

What are Software Defined Storage (SDS) Solutions?

Software-defined-storage (SDS) solutions are alternative data storage programs where the storage resources are decoupled from the underlying physical hardware. This makes them more flexible than traditional storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) programs that are attached to the hardware. SDS programs typically run on either the server operating system (OS) or virtual machines (VM). But certain programs may run on a hypervisor kernel which allows for multiple VMs to be used simultaneously on one device.

These programs are also related to software-defined networking (SDN) and the software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture. These products reflect a broader industry-wide shift towards the virtualization of software-related functions such as storage, networking, and security.

SDS solutions have become very popular for recently for a few key reasons including:

  1. the evolving and increasingly unstructured nature of data
  2. increasing customer need for data virtualization capabilities
  3. rising demand for cloud storage technologies

Common SDS use cases include:

  • DevOps
  • Workflow automation
  • Virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI)
  • Data security and protection
  • Data management of integrated public and private cloud systems
  • Providing better data access for remote offices
  • Increasing data storage efficiency by eliminating silos
  • Extending the life of more traditional storage systems

‘Scaling Out’ vs. ‘Scaling Up’ Storage Capacities

‘Scaling-out’ is an alternative to the more traditional 'scaling-up' method of increasing storage capacity. It involves adding additional storage space with SDS products that do not need to be physically attached to the hardware underneath.

Scaling-up storage involves adding more physical storage - such as disk drivers - to the original storage infrastructure to increase capacity. One drawback of scaling-up storage is that there is a limited amount of upgrading that can be done. In comparison, when scaling-out storage, there is essentially no limit to the amount of storage resources that can be added.

SDS Solutions Features and Capabilities

Most SDS products include a number of features and capabilities targeting storage management and functionality such as:

  • Abstraction of storage resources from the underlying hardware
  • Virtualization of pooled storage resources
  • Ability to manage pooled storage via one administrative interface
  • Policy-based management of storage resources
  • Ability to increase storage capacity through scaling-out the system across a server cluster
  • Compatibility with industry-standard hardware (x86 servers and API)
  • Access to different types of storage interfaces such as block, file, and object storage

However, there are a multiple storage options to consider when selecting an SDS product. These include different scale-out and/or block, file, and object options, container-based software, virtualized software, and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software.

Benefits of SDS

There are several benefits of using an SDS solution compared with traditional SAN or NAS style storage. Most importantly, they allow the user to update storage capacity while not altering the underlying physical hardware. They also enable the expansion of existing storage capacity to a virtually unlimited degree.

SDS products also offer cost related benefits which include:

  • lower upfront and operational costs
  • buyers avoid being ‘locked in’ to one software vendor (since they not tied to any specific hardware)
  • eliminate costs by ‘scaling out’ current storage capacity and adding on additional storage resources as needed

Pricing

The standard pricing model for storage software has been per GB, along with installment and upgrading costs. However, SDS vendors offer products whose prices are more dependent on use case, length of use, and amount of storage needed. Therefore prices may not be very standardized.

Vendors typically do not disclose price information on their website but provide it upon request.

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