This week, Chris and Martin talk to Datera CTO, Hal Woods about the state of the software-defined storage (SDS) market. SDS emerged around ten years ago as a solution to overcome the expense of buying storage appliances. With cheap hardware, IT organisations could simply buy software or use one of many open-source solutions.

Has SDS been successful and how has it evolved? Early modes of deployment simply ran existing storage software on commodity hardware. As the category developed, software defined storage has been built specifically to address a new set of requirements. These are typically based around offering more dynamic and flexible ways to implement persistent storage.

How has public cloud changed the perception of SDS? Clearly, IT teams are much more comfortable with storage as a service and solutions that deliver to standard metrics like latency, throughput and performance. Cloud challenges businesses to look at their TCO and baseline costs to understand the right solution for their needs.

You can find more about Datera’s software-defined software solution at https://datera.io/. Datera is also hosting a symposium to bring together vendors around the topic of the software-defined data centre. More details are available here – https://sddcsymposium.com/

Elapsed Time: 00:30:03

Timeline

* 00:00:00 – Intros* 00:01:10 – Where did SDS start?* 00:02:30 – Were vendors fairly marking up hardware?* 00:03:10 – SDS solutions are now “purpose built”* 00:04:45 – Hardware & software in SDS need to evolve separately* 00:05:30 – We’re seeing new data, not just storage requirements* 00:08:00 – Storage requirements are now much more dynamic* 00:10:20 – Is SDS more flexible in adopting new technologies?* 00:13:41 – How has public cloud affected our view of SDS?* 00:16:20 – Do new purchasing models mitigate appliance-based storage?* 00:18:32 – Hybrid & multi-cloud solutions are hard to deliver* 00:22:54 – Is data becoming the “centre” of IT?* 00:23:51 – What strategy should IT departments take in using SDS?* 00:26:48 – New projects are typically cloud/SDS-based.* 00:29:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

* Will TCO Drive Software-Defined Storage?* Object Storage Leading the Advancement of Software Defined Storage* Defining Software Defined Storage

Copyright (c) 2016-2019 Storage Unpacked. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast episode #34a3.