Software Defined Storage for multi-architecture hybrid cloud topologies

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Data and AI solutions constitute of massive amounts of unstructured data, primarily in the form of files or objects that IT must deal with. The challenges include - providing adequate amounts of storage in hybrid cloud topologies on demand and ensuring sophisticated data protection. Containerized workloads add another set of needs for seamless integration.

  • Scale and perform from small to extremely large deployments. Storage needs to be efficient, offering caching but avoiding unnecessary data copies.
  • Share data across boundaries and computing units and networks in a way, which makes the data consumable by the applications.
  • Ensure resilience, such as procedures for disaster recovery.
  • Manage local, distributed, and cloud storage in a consistent way.

In hybrid cloud solutions, you don’t plug hard disk drives into boxes. Well, yes, eventually somebody needs to do this somewhere. But that is not the point. The point is to create a fabric shared logical storage units. Software Defined Storage is all about storage virtualization and making it available to the workload, which fulfills the business needs. This fabric adds a level of abstraction to decouple the physical hardware, which can reside anywhere, from the consuming workload. The fabric can span virtual machines, hardware, networks, and even computer architectures. It creates the storage foundation for true hybrid workloads.

The value proposition of Software Defined Storage is to provide storage, which survives disasters, scales with the customer workload, and makes it simple to provision for use. Sharing of data across system boundaries is a key capability, which Software Defined Storage offers to modern highly distributed applications, like containerized Red Hat OpenShift workload.

Simply locally attached storage is not flexible enough in a world of hybrid cloud and AI. Software-Defined Storage is becoming essential when adapting quickly to the changing business needs. An application developer does not want to bother with physical disks, while an infrastructure administrator just wants to efficiently serve the needs of his developers, without having too much insight on the applications details.

In short: All stateful applications need storage. Providing storage for containers in a scalable way for enterprises is what software-defined storage is all about.

Note: In the world of hybrid cloud and AI, an application (and application developer) must not worry about persistent and storage. It’s just there and adapts to the demands of changing business needs.