This year Rajagopal Vaideeswaran and I had the pleasure to represent Veritas at the Data Storage Innovation Conference in Santa Clara. This is the second edition of this conference and it provides great content and trends from different storage vendors. As we could see in the conference, the future of storage is about commoditization and software defined.
In one side, we have the technology evolution in terms of Flash storage, where capacity is being doubled year by year at the same time that price is declining. Some of the vendors and analyst in the conference forecast Flash as a Tier 1 storage in the coming years.
In the other side, given the storage growth and the need to reduce costs, the fact of using commodity servers and sever side storage is very promising. Here the rise in many vendors talking about Software Defined Storage (SDS) nowadays. One key capability of SDS is to load software into a commodity set of servers and use server side storage to provide shared storage, at the same time that the solution increase agility and provide enterprise data services. This job had been done so far by enterprise storage arrays, dynamically provisioning pools of storage that at the end was done by proprietary software running in their controllers, and of course, running in their own hardware. All this at a very high cost. Nowadays, we still see some vendors that talk about SDS because they can use x86 servers, but that still provide a locking solution into their hardware, no matter whether it is x86.
If we want to use SDS to reduce costs, the first thing is about choices. Customers need to have freedom of choice, in order to use the vendor that better fits to their needs. Or non-disruptively replace it when there is a better choice or price during the next HW renewal. And this should not be only limited to x86 but to any platform. At the same time, the solution has to be capable to use any server side storage in any form, and not just a limited list of vendors or form factors combination. To provide the agility that is needed, things like storage provisioning, visibility, resiliency, capacity growth, snapshots, cloning, etc, needs to be provided by the software layer in an intuitive way. All these are things Veritas solutions have being doing for a long time, before even the term SDS was defined. We have just evolved our products into this trend by effectively use of Flash, any type of server-side storage to provide shared storage capabilities without having to use a SAN, increased automation and ease of use.
With the increasing performance improvements on CPU and interconnects really following the Moore’s Law, there are now lot of room within the servers that have the storage attached to also run applications. Therefore, when building a SDS solution, it is not only about the software but also about the application running on that server. Having visibility and control of those applications would provide an end to end solution. Again, managing service availability is another of the core strengths of Veritas solutions.
Rajagopal and I presented a very specific use case that tries to proof that SDS can run any tier 1 workload. For that reason we decided to use Oracle as a good example. By using Veritas technology, we was not only able to provide shared storage across the servers, in this case using very high performance Intel SSD devices, but also we was able to provide control of the application running in those servers. This combination, managed and controlled by a single pane of glass like Veritas Operations Manager, not only provided a very high performance at a fraction of All-Flash-Array costs, but also a very high resiliency with excellent SLAs. And of course, all is about choices, as this solution is not locked to any hardware vendor not platform.
And while we was talking about Oracle, this SDS solution can be used for any other workload, as one of the key things about Veritas solution is the flexibility of using software, so we can tune it for OLTP, DSS, Analytics, Streaming, Content Archiving and any other workload.
Here you can download our presentation from the SNIA web page:
