FOCUS ON THE FACTS: SOFTWARE-DEFINED

STORAGE

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: UNRAVELING THE SDS HYPE

CHAPTER 2: CRITICAL ATTRIBUTES OF SDS

CHAPTER 3: THE FUTURE IS NOW

CHAPTER 4: CUTTING THE HARDWARE CORD

CHAPTER 5: WHY RED RIVER & HP FOR SDS?

ABOUT RED RIVER

Introduction

Today’s IT departments are under tremendous pressure to deliver more value at higher velocity with fewer resources. Organizations can’t seem to acquire or deploy more or varied storage solutions fast enough. Even the most engineering-intensive hardware vendors can’t keep up with demand. Moreover, legacy hardware-defined storage alone no longer meets the escalating demands for increased capacity, flexibility or performance.

The fact is, the storage needs of organizations are so varied, that they are impossible to address with storage hardware alone. So

where does that leave businesses and agencies clamoring for relatively low-cost, rapidly scalable storage that is easy to manage and integrates seamlessly into multi-hypervisor data centers? They’re looking at software-defined storage (SDS), one of 2014’s hottest data center trends. But just what exactly is SDS and how can it benefit your organization? This e-book unravels the SDS hype and examines the critical attributes, key business drivers and reasons you may want to consider cutting the hardware cord and moving to SDS.

Read the ebook.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is garnering a lot of attention in the marketplace.

Like any savvy IT consumer, you may be a bit skeptical when the industry starts throwing around new terms or hyping up SDS as the next big thing and the solution to all of your problems. Let’s take a minute to unravel the SDS hype and see what SDS is really about.

Software delivers expansive capabilities that hardware-centric approaches of the past can’t provide, including faster development and deployment, enhanced flexibility

and agility. So, it makes sense to extend those across the IT environment through software. At its core, SDS is software applications layered on server infrastructure. In terms of functionality, SDS delivers advanced data services, like snapshots, provisioning and multi-site disaster recovery.

SDS is also at the heart of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) – an extension that takes software-defined approaches to storage and networking to their logical endpoint. There are an array of definitions for the SDDC, but it is

Chapter 1: Unraveling the SDS Hype

essentially the full IT infrastructure stack built on a standard set of platforms with common and interoperable data services, managed via application-aware orchestration and open application programming interfaces (APIs).

Media hype aside, SDS and the SDDC provide an efficient means of addressing the relentless demand for the rapid deployment of IT resources today’s organizations require to satisfy an ever-expanding set of demands. SDS and the SDDC allow businesses and federal, state and local agencies to:

• Support growth without complexity

• Accommodate unpredictable demand

• Provide instant access to information

• Deliver high service levels at acceptable costs

• Reduce and manage business risk

• Protect technology investments

Chapter 2: Critical Attributes of SDS

In order for storage to be truly software defined, it must meet three critical attributes, all of which enable cost optimization and maximum flexibility within the data center:

Hardware independence: By taking advantage of hypervisor virtualization technologies, virtual storage appliances (VSAs) can run on nearly any x86-based server and enable the redeployment of existing legacy storage arrays. This allows organizations to reuse older legacy equipment and efficiently optimize newly acquired technologies, effectively maximizing capital investments.

Hypervisor agnosticism: Eliminating hypervisor technology lock-in translates to long-term investment protection. True SDS allows an organization to employ common management and data services across multiple hypervisors (VMware, Hyper-V, Kernel-based Virtual Machine [KVM]) at one time, and also provides options to seamlessly change hypervisor infrastructures at a later time should IT or business requirements change.

Scale-out data services architecture: Over time, storage needs inevitably expand. Federation and autonomic management prevent organizations from being restricted to isolated data storage towers that do not interact well with the rest of their IT environment and free staff from management-intensive storage tasks. Scale-out data services provide a non-disruptive response to constantly changing demands as well as non-disruptive capacity growth.

These three critical attributes provide a compelling foundation for transitioning to SDS. With true SDS implementations, organizations are no longer locked into any particular storage hardware or hypervisor. Organizations can mix and match their virtualization environments as easily as they mix hardware. SDS allows organizations to create open pools of shared storage capacity with whatever standards-based hardware they currently have or may acquire and still respond quickly to changing business demands in multi-hypervisor environments.

SDS is not some far off, radical technology that you’ll be experiencing in the distant future.

For SDS, the future is now. Several factors are driving demand for SDS, including the growing need for IT efficiency, flexibility and choice. Plus, technical trends, such as virtualization, cloud computing, Big Data and mobility are also coming together to create an ideal alignment of business needs and IT that make now the perfect time for SDS. These factors include:

Increased server power: Single-CPU servers could efficiently handle the management of one or, at most, a few virtual machines. However, performance was often slow or unreliable compared to those same servers running directly as dedicated systems. Today’s more powerful servers have multiple processors to deliver robust platforms that can easily support the performance needs of both virtual applications and virtual storage appliances co-resident on the same system.

Chapter 3: The Future is Now

Rising adoption of solid state drives: As flash-based media has continued to drop in price, the increase in disk performance and capacity of solid state drives (SSDs), hybrid SSD and hard disk drive (HDD) combinations, makes it possible for software-defined storage to perform as well or better than conventional HDD storage in terms of both Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) and dollar per IOPS.

Widespread adoption of virtualization: Server virtualization has created demand for highly available, flexible shared storage. Widespread adoption of virtualization is also driving demand for greater storage efficiencies, and points to the ability to apply virtualization concepts to storage in order to achieve this. However, storage must be open and flexible, with the ability to support multi-hypervisor and cloud environments.

Chapter 4: Cutting the Hardware Cord

The real power of SDS lies in separating out hardware and data services from management and control, thus bringing new value through maximum cost optimization, flexibility and opportunities for orchestration across the SDDC.

In short, SDS allows organizations to create an open pool of shared storage capacity from whatever standards-based hardware they currently have (or will acquire) then use standards-based APIs to drive orchestration between storage resources and other aspects of the data center.

This approach gives organizations the freedom to repurpose existing server and storage hardware (or purchase newer commodity hardware) without being tied to a specific supplier. Perhaps more importantly, it opens up new possibilities for simplified management and orchestration across the data center -- for example, by enabling OpenStack development for hybrid cloud integration.

By eliminating hardware dependency in the physical layer, IT can still deliver advanced data services – including disaster

recovery, replication, thin provisioning, deduplication and more – while benefiting from the cost advantages it gets from the use of commodity hardware. By decoupling hardware from management, new possibilities open up for orchestration and cloud integration.

Chapter 5: Why HP & Red River for SDS?

Why trust storage, a fundamental building block of the SDDC, with a server virtualization software company or an unproven new entrant in the market?

HP has been a player in SDS and the SDDC since inception and is the only vendor capable of delivering on all elements of the SDDC – compute, networking, storage and management – offering a complete SDS strategy and vision based on simplicity, efficiency and openness that make storage availability a top priority.

Red River is a longstanding HP Partner with a forward-thinking storage practice and strong understanding of SDS. We know exactly what it takes to transition businesses and public sector agencies to this proven storage architecture for the software-defined data center. Let Red River identify the right SDS options for your infrastructure and show you how to leverage SDS to lower costs, increase storage capacity and simplify management and maintenance. Contact us to learn more about SDS today.

About Red River Red River is an IT hardware integrator committed to helping customers optimize business processes and maximize the value of IT investments. Widely regarded for our special focus on the U.S. government, Red River has developed a remarkable reputation for delivering IT products and hardware-related services to military and civilian agencies and the companies that serve them. Our core values of hard work and honesty fuel our central mission to make IT personal.

Learn more at www.redriver.com.

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