Exploring the benefits and challenges of hyper converged and software-defined storage

December 9th, 2018

Software-defined, hyper converged and cloud storage are the fast becoming the widely accepted norms of the IT space and according to Data Core, while hyper converged is making inroads, organizations are struggling while software-defined storage is seeing a greater number of use cases.

Although Data Core’s primary business line is through software-defined the study conducted by them polled 400 IT professionals who were using or evaluating software-defined storage, hyper converged and cloud storage, and found plenty of interesting statistics to consider.

While 60% felt that automating frequent or complex storage operations was a key business driver for implementing these storage technologies overall, 56% voted for simple storage management and another 56% pitched in for extended life of existing storage assets.

Performance was the key driver for hyper converged, whereas automation and reduced complexity was for software-defined storage. Public cloud, failed in terms of delivering higher performance, in turn falling out of the considered choices.

Business continuity and data protection were the primary capabilities expected from storage infrastructure by 74% of those polled.

hyper converged and software-defined storage diagram

37% participants had standardized on software-defined storage than other technologies. All-flash array was the next most popular having 29% of the votes much ahead of HCI which bagged 21%, hybrid getting 18%, public with 17% and containers receiving the least number of votes by 10%. All-flash however got plenty of votes when it came to future deployment – one in three respondents said they were strongly considering it but had yet to deploy. 42% of those polled said they had no interest in public clouds and containers respectively due to lack of sufficient storage tools or data management services, a slowdown in application response time and a lack of persistent storage for key applications.

Software-defined storage was considered a useful tool with regards to vendor lock-in within storage by 42% of those polled. With hyper-converged, the key concerns were lack of integration, lack of scale and price – the study recommends what it calls ‘hybrid-converged’ technology, which amounts to being able to deploy various storage options from a unified management plane.