Why should you be excited about Software Defined Storage (SDS)?   

 

 

In this video, WEI's Senior Solutions Architect, Josh Satrape, shares the key benefits of SDS and how companies are using SDS as a cost-effective solution to support VDI environments. The video also provide insight about two leading solutions that are helping to transform IT: VMware’s VSAN and HPE’s VSA.

Video not your thing? Follow along with the transcription below:

Josh Satrape:

So a big buzzword right now in the industry is software defined storage. A lot of customers, we go into talk to them about it, and they don't really know why they should be excited about it. One of the big things about software defined storage is it's extracting the hardware layer, just like software defined networking did for us, just like server virtualization also did for us.

 

So most software defined storage solutions, they take the traditional storage array out of the picture. They add storage into the hosts. That storage is then replicated across all the hosts in the cluster, and you can set different fault failure levels. You can say that you want two copies of every PM. You can say you want three copies of every PM, and that way if you lose a host you still have all your storage available.

 

So one of the great use cases of software defined storage is for VDI environments. So virtual desktop environments usually have really high IOP requirements. Usually the storage arrays to support those are very costly. With SDS, whether that's VMware vSAN or HPE's BSA, it can allow you to inexpensively build out your VDI environment and have this backend storage that can actually support it.

 

VMware's software defined storage solution called vSAN actually just added a huge new piece of functionality, which is the ability to do dedupe and compression on all flash storage solutions, which really drives the cost per gigabyte down dramatically.

 

Another software defined storage solution that we work with a lot is HP's VSA. So all of the HP hyperconverged chassis all come with a VSA included. What that gives you is software defined storage that's tightly integrated with vSphere. A VMware admin can simply go in, right click on a cluster, provision more storage. They don't have to get a storage administrator involved. They don't have to create any backend storage pools or LUNs. It's all just baked in.

 

One of the hesitations a lot of customers might have is around the performance or scalability of software defined storage. When in reality most of the software defined storage options can actually scale much higher than the traditional storage array that most customers are used to.

 

One of the difficulties with your traditional storage arrays is the cost of a warranty renewal. That's one of the benefits of software defined storage. Generally, you already have warranties on your servers and your hard drives are in those servers, so you don't have that added cost.

 

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