Software wave binary

Define this

Longform
Image: StockXpert

4 September 2014

There is a lot of talk about ‘software defined’ at the moment, usually accompanied by one of ‘storage’, ‘networking’ or ‘data centre’. We don’t usually hear that much about software defined and compute, but there’s a good reason for that. To all intents and purposes, software defined compute is already here, it’s just that we usually refer to it by another term: virtualisation.

In many respects, software defined is a means of extending the benefits of virtualisation to storage, networking or (the ultimate objective) the data centre. No surprises then that virtualisation at the compute level (or should that be software defined compute) has proven to be the catalyst for software defined storage (SDS) because most storage solutions have been unable to cope with the increased workload density virtualisation has created.

“A lot of companies have become disappointed with their storage solutions,” remarks Francis O’Haire, director of technology and strategy at Data Solutions. “They were designed in the old days for non-virtualised workloads and when the workload density shot up with virtualisation the SAN became a massive bottleneck.”

He says some storage vendors are starting to bring solutions to customers who “are at their wit’s end with the old architecture. Look at Google, Amazon, Facebook, they don’t architect data centres in the way that enterprises traditionally would. They deploy a very distributed architecture. It’s very software defined, the storage lives all over the network”.

Nexenta CEO Tarkan Maner is a very strong proponent of SDS, understandably given the fact Nexenta is heavily involved in the SDS space. In an interview at VMWorld Barcelona 2013 Maner highlighted the differences, as he saw them, between legacy storage and SDS. “As you know, storage is the highest amount, the worst IT cost in the entire data centre,” he proclaimed. “It is the biggest part and the worst part of the data centre and needs to be revolutionalised. So what we’ve seen is basically with software defined storage you are revolutionalising and changing and democratising the data centre inside and out.”

Convincing
As Mandy Rice-Davies said all those years ago: “he would say that, wouldn’t he?” It’s not as if SDS happened overnight. For example, Data Solutions did business for several years with one of the first SDS vendors but, as O’Haire puts it: “People just didn’t get it. It was a difficult argument to bring to the channel to say people can buy any hardware, put software on it and manage any way they wanted to.”

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