What is Software Defined Storage?

What is Software-Designed Storage?

Software-designed storage (SDS) is a storage architecture that decouples storage software from its hardware, giving you greater scalability, flexibility, and control over your data storage infrastructure.

Why Decouple Storage Software from Data Storage Infrastructure?

To read or write data to a storage device, you need to be able to interface with the software layer governing data management within the device. Beyond the most basic drivers needed for data access, it’s also important to be able to manage the storage device itself and its interactions with other devices when plugged into a larger system like a storage area network (SAN).

In practice, this meant dealing with a disparate network of servers, each with their own proprietary management software operating environments. As the data needs of enterprises scaled, so too did the complexity of integrating new capacity into a cluster of commodity hardware. Even if you stuck with a particular vendor, you would still need to manage compatibility with the operating systems of older servers in your data center.

Enter SDS—a way to achieve the principles of infrastructure as code (IaC) but at the data storage level. By abstracting away the details of the individual servers and their proprietary software, organizations gained the flexibility to treat the entire cluster as a single programmable software-defined data center (SDDC).

The Benefits of Software-defined Storage

The primary benefits of SDS include:

• A simplified storage system for pulling data—agnostic of location—for easier automation
• Scale-out architecture that can non-disruptively add new capacity when required
• Greatly reduced storage management costs

Because SDS is easy to automate, it’s possible to automatically distribute workloads across your infrastructure as needed and make real-time adjustments with data demand.

Why Choose Purity for Software-defined Storage?

The Pure Storage®Purity operating environmentoffers advanced services to help you capture the benefits of software-defined storage. Purity provides:

• Industry-leading data reduction
• Tier 1 resiliency with zero performance loss
• Built-in disaster recovery and protection
• Global flash management
• Consolidation of cloud and on-premises storage into one hybrid cloud withPure Cloud Block Store™

纯度是designed around a variable block size with the realization that I/O is a variable size on all arrays, especially in mixed and virtualized environments. This insight led Pure to architect a storage solution that combines cloud economics with on-premises control and efficiency.