It’s Time to Start Looking at Software-Defined Storage

Even if you haven’t read our past posts here on the data explosion, the growth of enterprise data is probably no surprise to you. Whether it’s Facebook’s announcements of 900,000-square-foot data centers[1] or Ericsson’s estimates of 29 billion connected objects by 2022, data growth seems to be behind half the articles and announcements in technology today. So regardless of your industry, you know you’re going to need a massively scalable data storage solution to keep up. The only question is whether you need to act now or if you can watch as the market develops.

There are a lot of reasons we think those in IT roles—like tech architects and engineers—should be in the driver’s seat wh

en it comes to storage the unattended-upgrade-sle15 need, it’s unlikely

they understand the urgency. After all, as individuals they’re used to getting a seemingly infinite amount of storage for their personal cloud accounts. The enormous scale of the enterprise problem is hard for them to grasp.

And the cost of waiting is going to be significant for you. Find a solution now and that solution will be ready as storage demands grow. Put it off and the task of keeping your current storage up to speed will drain your budget and consume your time until you reach a crisis point, which isn’t where anyone wants to be.

That’s why we think software-defined storage (SDS) should be on your radar. It’s the best solution out there for handling today’s growing data volumes—unless your organization is going to give you a giant budget increase someday soon.

If you’re confused or unsure about SDS, you don’t need to be. We know that there are vendors and tech writers out there that use the term “software defined” to label just about everything—without much thought for how those things actually work. But true SDS in the form of the open source project Ceph has been around long enough to have proved its worth. Ceph 5 is a tried-and-tested SDS solution, which is why it’s the foundation for SUSE® Enterprise Storage.

SDS offers a full suite of persistent storage services via an autonomous software stack that can run on an industry-standard, commodity hardware platform. In short: all the storage services you need, whether block, file or object, running as software on whatever hardware you prefer.

If you’re still debating, it might help to see how your peers are tackling their storage challenges. A tour through the logos on Ceph.com is one way to see the big names—like Bloomberg, CERN and Cisco—that have already taken the leap.

Here are a few more examples. The IT team at University of Valencia went the SDS route and is saving 40 percent on storage costs with SUSE Enterprise Storage. For Experian, a provider of marketing, credit and fraud detection services, SDS provided the solution for keeping up with enormous data growth and getting storage back under control. In the words of Howard Samm, Experian’s head of infrastructure for business intelligence, “Taking a software-defined approach to our storage environment not only enables us to manage our IT infrastructure more efficiently, it also maximizes the availability of our systems.”

If your peers at organizations like these are experiencing this kind of success, imagine what would be possible for your organization. Do you really want to wait until business users read about SDS on their favorite tech blog and come to you with half-formed ideas? We think it’s a better idea to drive the SDS conversation yourself. In some upcoming posts we’ll help those in the tech architect and engineer roles explore possible solutions and learn more of the details behind SDS, so be sure to come back soon.

[1] www.datacenterknowledge.com/facebook/facebook-build-two-more-massive-data-centers-oregon