Through the Looking Glass: Vulture pecks at software-defined storage Trying to pin down a definition of software-defined storage (SDS) is like using a dictionary written by Humpty Dumpty, where words change their meaning from day to day. Every storage marketing person on the planet thinks SDS is a good thing and their storage product exemplifies its benefits and minimises its disadvantages. So …
How can you tell when a storage vendor is lying? When the spokesman's lips are moving.
This artificial distinction between "software-based" and "software-defined" is a case in point. It serves no purpose but to muddy the waters. Most storage arrays offer programmatic or API-level access; the question is, what is the hardware dependency? To my mind, "software-defined" means that the logical units of storage (volumes, containers, whatever) and any higher-level storage functions are governed by a control plane that is not dependent on a particular vendor's hardware, so I can drop the control software in a VM or on white box hardware and manipulate vendor-independent storage with it instead of having to pay for a particular array. That's it. Obviously, the individual vendors want to define "software-defined" as whatever suits their needs. (Now, one could argue that Nutanix is not SDS on that basis, and I would say that it falls into a gray area, where the storage is technically software-defined but tied to a particular vendor's architecture.)
Personally, I could give a rat's ass, I just want the vendors to be up-front with their product's limitations. I'm filled to the brim with storage buyer's remorse, so they can all die in a fire as far as I'm concerned (with one notable exception, who I won't name so as not to be called a shill by the usual suspects).
It's fairly straightforward. "Software-defined storage" is a meaningless phrase coined up by storage marketing shills in an attempt to capture the halo effect that currently surrounds "Software Defined Networking" (SDN), which is still going strong in the hype cycle, with its positive associations of cost savings by commoditization.
Storage, like networking, is one of the few areas of the IT industry that has managed to preserve its fat profit margins, but distributed storage architectures like Hadoop from the Web-scale world are putting an end to that, and the high-performance storage is going direct-attached SSD anyways, as the latency of a SAN or NAS array is unacceptably orders of magnitude higher.
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