5 Reasons Why Software Defined Storage (SDS) is Good for your Business

Software Defined Storage (SDS) has become a universally accepted approach to data storage in the storage market today. But what really makes software defined storage good for business? What makes this data storage model better than the options out there?

In this article, we look at five reasons that separate software defined storage from other storage options.

5 Best Features of Software Defined Storage (SDS)

#1: High Availability

Software Defined Storage makes it easier to configure multiple appliance nodes or systems as clusters and use them for high availability purposes.

Data availability is important for all kinds of businesses that rely on technology. If the data isn’t available, it leads to downtime. And downtime translates to financial losses, customer loss, and reputation damage.

Software defined storage solutions, such as StoneFlyStoneFusion™, enable users to use iSCSI enabled appliances and use them to setup failover and failback clusters.

Such setups facilitate instant recovery in the event of hardware failure or primary system failure.

#2: Easier Scalability

Software defined storage frees data center owners from the fixed hardware models of legacy storage infrastructure.

It’s far easier, quick, and simple to scale with software defined storage. By leveraging SDS solutions, businesses can scale up and scale out their data center infrastructure. However, the ability to scale also depends on the software defined solutions used to do so and the storage infrastructure being used with it.

For example, StoneFly StoneFusion SDS enables users to scale without limits. And users can choose to scale up or scale out. This is true for their NAS appliances, Unified appliances, and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).

#3: Flexibility to Adapt with a Dynamic Landscape

The world of IT is way too dynamic for legacy and traditional infrastructures to keep up. But that’s not a problem with software defined storage solutions.

SDS enables data center owners to provision, repurpose and adapt their storage as the requirements change. The ability of software defined storage solutions to work free of the hardware make-up of the storage infrastructure truly opens up a world of options for data center administrators.

A good analogy to understand the capabilities and flexibility of software defined storage would be that they’re like Swiss army knives.

#4: Simpler but Efficient Management

Again this ability depends heavily on the vendor but software defined storage solutions are capable of making management hassle-free for the devOps engineer and the IT administrator.

Usually, SDS deliver single centralized systems that are capable of managing the entire storage system. They also provide insightful tools that can help monitor and control the storage resources within a data center.

And data services such as automated tiering make it a lot easier to avoid human error and automate data management for repetitive tasks.

#5: Cost Control

If it’s easier to manage, then the cost really sits in the hands of the one managing the data center infrastructure.

And data services such as deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, etc. also enable data center owners to control the cost of their data storage solution by optimizing the storage capacity utilization rates.

Conclusion

Traditional technologies, such as tape drives etc. have seen the end of the line. While they are good for long term, cost effective archiving, they cannot keep up with the requirements of the dynamical IT industry.

Software defined storage are built to be flexible enough to change as the requirements change. This makes them a technology for the age of today and tomorrow.