The Rise of SDS and Flash in Enterprise Storage

The Rise of SDS and
Flash in Enterprise Storage

Sumir Bhatia, Vice President,
Data Centre Group, Asia Pacific.

A famous company once coined the
phrase – “the Whole World is… Data!”

It all ties back to data, whether
we’re talking about YouTube, Facebook, Uber, Deliveroo, SAP, High Performance
Computing (HPC) or databases. Today’s increasingly connected world reflects
that very phrase. Data has grown exponentially, due to the rise of Internet of
Things, social media and big data. For enterprises, this avalanche of data also
presents a wellspring of untapped knowledge.

Mining Data for Endless Possibilities

The ability to store data is only
half the story. To truly benefit from the new knowledge economy, organisations
need to know how to manage data effectively, analyse and extract meaningful
intelligence out of it. The possibilities are endless, once businesses and
governments understand this. Some organisations have already put this into
practice:

All-Flash Arrays and Storage Virtualisation

In general, data that is
frequently accessed is termed ‘hot data’. Examples include databases,
Enterprise Resource Planning systems and webpages. With flash drives being
priced more competitively nowadays, the adoption of all-flash arrays for these
mission-critical applications has become a reality. Today, the leader in this
space is Nimble Storage.

The real growth of flash adoption,
however, came with hybrid arrays, which deployed tiering between flash and
traditional disk drives. With the arrival of storage virtualisation, enterprises
can achieve this completely via software. In today’s landscape, IBM Spectrum Virtualize,
IBM StorWise and DataCore offer such capabilities and are the most mature in the
market.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and Object Storage

Data that is infrequently
accessed is called ‘cold data’. It can exist either in structured form, such as
backup and archival data which most enterprises are using, or unstructured form,
for items like large videos, pictures, and blogs. Such data can range from
small file sizes of a few kilobytes to large terabyte file sizes, or from a few
hundred files, upwards to billions or trillions of files.

Managing millions of small files
is altogether a different matter from managing a smaller number of ultra-large
ones. While both cases can take up the same storage capacity, older architectures
are unable to support the high level of granularity involved, from a data
management standpoint. Therefore, SDS and Object Storage are introduced to
address this trend. Cloudian is a leader in the Object Storage SDS space.

Unlike Object Storage, it is
equally challenging to manage traditional File and Block storage, especially in
large capacities due to the escalating costs of Storage Area Networks. SDS,
with its scale-out architectures, can help to reduce the costs of storage
significantly. Nexenta currently leads the File and Block SDS market.

For homogenous workloads where performance,
capacity, and scale are needed, we’re seeing specific HPC workloads like
machine-learning systems that require not just petaflops of performance, but
also petabytes of data. For this, specialised low latency SDS offerings like
IBM’s Spectrum Scale are ideal.

Bridging Traditional and New Storage Technologies

To cope with the different types
of storage data, the industry has to embrace a more granular approach on how it
addresses different workloads. Even as new software defined technologies are
being rapidly developed, enterprises will still need a trusted technology provider
to bridge the traditional with the software defined solutions of tomorrow. After
completing its acquisition of IBM’s x86 server and networking portfolio, Lenovo
is well-positioned to serve this crucial role, helping enterprises explore this
new chapter in storage innovation – and the future is looking bright.