Software-defined storage (SDS) is a virtualized network of storage resources that separates the control and management software from the underlying storage hardware infrastructure. Enterprises using an SDS solution can tie together large pools of storage resources so that they appear as a single virtual entity.
With all of its appeal, some people and enterprises are wondering how safe their data are in an SDS solution. Here are some things to consider if you’re trying to answer that question for your own data.
SDS Expertise Can Be Hard to Find
Staffing can prove to be a challenge for on-premises SDS solutions in a couple of ways. Because the SDS market is still nascent, SDS operations and administration expertise can be hard to find in your employment market.
Such a scarcity of expertise can very well contribute to a situation where you can compromise your data integrity and security because of staffing issues. Consider the fact that to run SDS, you must have staff with hardware, storage, and specialized SDS experience to do it properly.
Of course, you can raise your own SDS talent internally through training and outside consultants, but that means that you have the time and budget to do it, and too many of us don’t have that. It can be doubly true for organizations in which IT generalists rather than storage administrators run the storage.
Cloud Service Providers Offer SDS
The lack of SDS expertise in the market may make you turn to a cloud service provider (CSP) for infrastructure and expertise. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform are all adding SDS services through alliances with storage players such as Dell EMC and Nexanta.
SDS Is Future-Proof
If you’re storing data for the long haul, SDS offers a future-proof solution that’s independent from the expense and hassles of hardware vendor lock-in. If you’re looking for a long-term storage and archival solution that maintains the safety of your data, then SDS is a solution you should definitely consider.
SDS Improves Security, Governance, and Data Protection
SDS security includes improvements that you’re not going to find in traditional hardware-based on-premises storage solutions. For example, the software independency of the SDS deployment model makes security, governance, and data protection much easier. It also makes service level agreement and quality of service management easier for your IT team.
SDS Enhances Scalability
On another positive note, SDS enhances scalability, which can help preserve data safety because it provides greater capacity with greater efficiency. These in turn offer cost advantages throughout the long-term storage life cycle.
SDS Support for Automatic Storage Provisioning
When you implement SDS, you get a solution that bypasses or doesn’t require storage management firmware or hardware-based management on top of your storage resources. In addition, SDS-enabled and powered storage infrastructure provisions storage automatically through predefined policies, removing the prospect of human error harming the safety of your data during the provisioning process.
Final Verdict
SDS hits all the right enterprise storage trends, but it’s still an emerging technology for the average organization. Therefore, outsourcing SDS to a hyperscale or other CSP is probably the best option for maintaining your data safety.
