Horizontal and Elastic Orchestration of Software-Defined Storage

Ever since the term “software-defined storage”, or SDS, was coined a few short years ago, the industry has seen a long list of SDS offerings in all shapes and sizes, promising scale-out solutions to handle the explosive amount of data that is said to grow 40~50% per year. While many of these new breeds bring convincing value propositions to the marketplace, few considered themselves as an extension to the good old legacy systems such as EMC or NetApp. However, whether the data of yesterday should be entirely isolated from the new (big) data of today is a question best answered by the application users, not the storage vendors. Lacking a horizontal and elastic storage orchestration platform to simultaneously manage both legacy storage arrays and scale-out x86 hardware from a single pane of glass probably explains why SDS is still primarily a vendor-driven technology.

Learning Objectives

Horizontal federation for heterogeneous storage environments
Separation of control and data planes defines SDS
Pluggable storage docking station architecture
Policy based self-service provisioning and automatic, predictive storage allocation is holy grail
Automatic deployment of the storage cloud is key to adoption