Are all software-defined storage vendors the same?

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchDataCenter.

What does software-defined storage mean? How is it implemented? And why does it matter for data center managers?

Software-defined storage is an overused and under-defined term, but the general idea is to implement storage services such that they can be dynamically reconfigured as needed, usually through the use of software-based virtual nodes.

Generally, software-defined versions of storage have extremely competitive price points, and deploy on virtual machines and/or commodity hardware.

Some software-defined storage vendors take aim only at the virtualization environment. Many offerings available today […] are cross-platform, global and more grid-like solutions that can be provisioned and grow across an organization as needed. The best of these freely scaling offerings offer built-in global replication, a single namespace and advanced analytics (for a storage system) like content indexing, distributed big data style processing and sophisticated usage and auditing management.

Several storage trends — scale-out, object-based, cloud-ready and software-defined — deserve your attention…

…(read the complete as-published article there)