According to Storage Newsletter.com, “the total software-defined storage market is expected to grow from $1,409.7 million in 2014 to $6,217.6 million by 2019, at a CAGR of 34.6% from 2014 to 2019”.
The interest in Software Defined Storage (SDS) comes as no surprise, with the promise of delivering both greater agility and enhanced quality of service (QoS) for applications, while exerting a tight rein on costs. The first fundamental step in achieving this is by abstracting storage capabilities dynamically delivered across physical or virtual devices, independent of location or class of storage involved. SDS is now the direction in which the industry is heading and represents everything that Symantec has been doing and innovating for the past 20 years in the storage space.
The Symantec Cluster File System has SDS at its heart, with all of the key elements built in that the technology has been designed to deliver to enterprises. It’s worth taking a look at these in some detail:
Storage Virtualization– presents storage as a large pool of capacity to the server, allowing for better performance of the application. That is a core functionality of what Symantec does with Storage Foundation today and indeed has provided for the past 15 plus years – virtualizing back-end storage and making it look like one big pool of capacity that servers can use.
Quality of Service– all applications accessing data from the storage pool get the same level of storage performance. However, all applications are not ‘born equal’: some applications are more mission critical than others. Which raises the question: how do you ensure the mission/business-critical applications get more? This is where intelligent software – and Symantec – comes in. Because a superior storage management layer will identify the critical workloads and optimize them… every time.
Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS)– this is unique to Symantec. We introduced FSS as a new feature at the back end of 2013, providing a “shared-nothing architecture” enabling organizations to utilize direct attached storage (DAS) while experiencing 400% better read and write performance at 25% of the cost of traditional Storage Area Networks (SAN). Cluster File System provides a global name space across up to eight nodes. That means each server has the same view into the storage space and can share data across the nodes without the requirement of an expensive and complex SAN. All of this can be done with all of the rich, advanced storage functionality at the user’s fingertips.
Crucially, what this delivers is:
- Flexibility– you can add and remove nodes easily. Also, any type of storage can be used by the nodes.
- Reliability– all this sharing doesn’t compromise reliability. Using data replication, multiple copies of the data are maintained across the nodes. That way, even if a node goes down, there is no loss of data.
- Support– we support InfiniBand as interconnects. We, of course, also support Ethernet. This again gives flexibility. Also, if customers were to go with InfiniBand, that drastically increases the interconnect speed and thus the performance of their entire set-up.
Advanced Storage Capabilities– this embraces features such as storage tiering, dynamic multi-pathing, thin reclamation, dedupe, compression, embedded cache for Solid State Devices (SSD), etc.: all features that are required for SDS and that Symantec has introduced to the market over the years. Also, we can deliver this across any platform, whether that is a legacy UNIX system, Linux, Windows or virtual machines. We are agnostic as to what platform you may be running or planning to move to in the future – or what kind of storage you might have on the back end.
However, there is more to the story, because all of this can be accomplished with SSDs as well. So, if you need high performance for a specific application, you can deploy SSD and Symantec can give you the software component to do all the things SSD cannot do stand-alone. That sweep and breadth of appeal is the reason why so many large enterprises have turned to our Symantec Cluster File System offering. At the same time, increasing numbers of mid-enterprise organizations are recognizing its advantages as well.
Ultimately, anyone running a mission-critical application on which their business depends can reap the Symantec Cluster File System’s many availability, performance and cost benefits.
For more information, please see the ‘Software-Defined Storage from Symantec and Intel: Applications in a Flash’ solution overview paper.