1. Software-Defined Storage Makes
Economic Sense
Haluk Ulubay
Sr. Director, Marketing, DataCore Software Corp.
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 1

2. Agenda
 What is Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
 Distinguishing Characteristics
 Risks
 Top 3 SDS Reasons
 Check list
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 2

3. SDS Definition – A Sampling
• Wikipedia: “an evolving concept for computer data storage software to
manage policy-based provisioning and management of data
storage independent of the underlying hardware.” - Wikipedia
• SearchSDN: “an approach to data storage in which the programming
that controls storage-related tasks is decoupled from the physical
storage hardware.”
• IDC: “platforms that deliver the full suite of storage services via a
software stack that uses (but is not dependent on) commodity
hardware built with off-the-shelf components.”
• Webopedia: “Storage infrastructure that is managed and
automated by intelligent software as opposed to by the storage
hardware itself. In this way, the pooled storage infrastructure
resources in a software-defined storage environment can be
automatically and efficiently allocated to match the application needs
of an enterprise.”
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 3

4. Distinguishing Characteristics
 Separates advances in software from advances in
hardware (i.e., abstraction)
 Stand-alone, intelligent software that runs on multiple
hardware instances
 Does not require proprietary hardware
 Provides a common set of storage services for all
types of storage devices / systems underneath
 Pools all storage capacity and provides centralized
management
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 4

5. Risks for IT Managers
 Various & sometimes narrow implementations of
SDS that:
• Only applies to a use case (e.g., Virtual SAN, hyper-
converged)
• Are controllers that require specific hardware
• Is confined to limited types of storage
• Is tied to a specific hypervisor
• …
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 5

6. Top 3 SDS Drivers
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 6
In a survey that was published in April 2015 (*), the following was reported:
“What are the business drivers for implementing Software-Defined Storage?”
(*) Survey conducted by DataCore Software Corp. n = 948
40% 42% 44% 46% 48% 50% 52%
Extend the life of existing storage
assets
Avoid hardware lock-in
Simplify management by automating
storage operations
52%
49%
45%
Financial
services
12%
Healthcare
12%
Government
13%
Manufacturi
ng
11%
Education
9%
IT services
17%
Other
26%
INDUSTRY
< $10M
28%
$10M -
$100M
34%
$100M -
$1B
19%
> $1B
19%
ANNUAL REVENUE

7. Hardware Abstraction
 Maybe the most obvious benefit: “Choice to choose”
 Ability to utilize different vendors’ storage hardware
(side by side or interchangeably), including the server
side, current and future
• As long as the SLA is met for the particular application that is
asking for the “service”
 Brings future investment protection & lower CAPEX
 Features such as auto-tiering make this easy as well
 SDS software running on any x86 platform is icing on
the cake
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 7

8. Costs: CAPEX vs OPEX
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 8
Considering a heterogeneous storage
environment:
 Hardware / licenses / maintenance
contracts is CAPEX and can be
amortized over useful life.
 Significant amount of OPEX / TCO
come from administrative work
 Best to select an SDS solution that
will minimize operational costs
• Data migrations
• Hardware maintenance and refresh
• Planned and unplanned downtime
• Capacity expansion
Source: Jon Toigo, Optimizing the economics of storage: It’s all about
the Benjamins. 2015.

9. Management
 “Management of storage infrastructure” is
also referred to by most definitions.
 All storage pulled into a virtual pool,
eliminating wasted capacity (i.e., no
siloes).
• Thin-provisioned
 Automating and collapsing tedious &
manual tasks
 Single pane of glass to manage all
storage in the pool provides for:
• Simplified configuration and management,
including SANs and cloud storage
• Lower OPEX (less training, personnel,
support of different management
systems)
• Multiple sitesSanta Clara, CA USA
December 2015 9

10. What Else Could Come w/ SDS?
 Data Protection / High availability storage
• Synch mirroring, snapshots / backups, auto fail-
over & fail-back
• Live maintenance (upgrades, migrations)
 DR
• Asynchronous replication over long distances
 Application performance
• Caching
• Auto-tiering
• Parallelism where applicable
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 10

11. Checklist
• Do I need to buy proprietary hardware to run the SDS software?
• Can the SDS solution pool and manage all of the heterogeneous
hardware systems that I have now (and the ones I am planning
to add in the next 12 months?)
• Does it provide me with a single management interface with
which I can provision (manual and auto) and manage all storage
systems that I have in multiple sites?
• As a minimum feature set, does it have virtual pooling, auto-
tiering, no-touch fail-over / fail-back (make your list)
• Can I do in-service (hitless) planned maintenance, s/w or h/w
upgrades, migrations? How many nodes are required to do that?
• How does it handle i/o bottlenecks (that will slow down business
critical applications?)
• What benchmarks will help me choose between alternatives?
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 11

12. THANK YOU!
Haluk Ulubay
Haluk.ulubay@datacore.com
www.datacore.com
Santa Clara, CA USA
December 2015 12