Software-defined storage

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Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. [1] The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.

Contents

Software-defined storage (SDS) hardware may or may not also have abstraction, pooling, or automation software of its own. When implemented as software only in conjunction with commodity servers with internal disks, it may suggest software such as a virtual or global file system. If it is software layered over sophisticated large storage arrays, it suggests software such as storage virtualization or storage resource management, categories of products that address separate and different problems. If the policy and management functions also include a form of artificial intelligence to automate protection and recovery, it can be considered as intelligent abstraction. [2] Software-defined storage may be implemented via appliances over a traditional storage area network (SAN), or implemented as network-attached storage (NAS), or using object-based storage. In March 2014 the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) began a report on software-defined storage. [3]

Software-defined storage industry

VMware used the marketing term "software-defined data center" (SDDC) for a broader concept wherein all the virtual storage, server, networking and security resources required by an application can be defined by software and provisioned automatically. [4] [5] Other smaller companies then adopted the term "software-defined storage", such as Cleversafe (acquired by IBM), and OpenIO.

Based on similar concepts as software-defined networking (SDN), [6] interest in SDS rose after VMware acquired Nicira for over a billion dollars in 2012.

Data storage vendors used various definitions for software-defined storage depending on their product-line. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a standards group, attempted a multi-vendor, negotiated definition with examples. [7]

The software-defined storage industry is projected to reach $86 billion by 2023. [8]

Building on the concept of VMware, esurfing cloud has launched a new software-defined storage product called HBlock. HBlock is a lightweight storage cluster controller that operates in user mode. It can be installed on any Linux operating system as a regular application without root access, and deployed alongside other applications on the server. HBlock integrates unused disk space across various servers to create high-performance and highly available virtual disks. These virtual disks can be mounted to local or other remote servers using the standard iSCSI protocol, revitalizing storage resources on-site without impacting existing operations or requiring additional hardware purchases. [9]

Characteristics

Characteristics of software-defined storage may include the following features: [10]

Storage hypervisor

In computing, a storage hypervisor is a software program which can run on a physical server hardware platform, on a virtual machine, inside a hypervisor OS or in the storage network. It may co-reside with virtual machine supervisors or have exclusive control of its platform. Similar to virtual server hypervisors a storage hypervisor may run on a specific hardware platform, a specific hardware architecture, or be hardware independent. [11]

The storage hypervisor software virtualizes the individual storage resources it controls and creates one or more flexible pools of storage capacity. In this way it separates the direct link between physical and logical resources in parallel to virtual server hypervisors. By moving storage management into isolated layer it also helps to increase system uptime and High Availability. "Similarly, a storage hypervisor can be used to manage virtualized storage resources to increase utilization rates of disk while maintaining high reliability." [12]

The storage hypervisor, a centrally-managed supervisory software program, provides a comprehensive set of storage control and monitoring functions that operate as a transparent virtual layer across consolidated disk pools to improve their availability, speed and utilization.

Storage hypervisors enhance the combined value of multiple disk storage systems, including dissimilar and incompatible models, by supplementing their individual capabilities with extended provisioning, data protection, replication and performance acceleration services.

In contrast to embedded software or disk controller firmware confined to a packaged storage system or appliance, the storage hypervisor and its functionality spans different models and brands and types of storage [including SSD (solid state disks), SAN (storage area network) and DAS (direct attached storage) and Unified Storage(SAN and NAS)] covering a wide range of price and performance characteristics or tiers. The underlying devices need not be explicitly integrated with each other nor bundled together.

A storage hypervisor enables hardware interchangeability. The storage hardware underlying a storage hypervisor matters only in a generic way with regard to performance and capacity. While underlying "features" may be passed through the hypervisor, the benefits of a storage hypervisor underline its ability to present uniform virtual devices and services from dissimilar and incompatible hardware, thus making these devices interchangeable. Continuous replacement and substitution of the underlying physical storage may take place, without altering or interrupting the virtual storage environment that is presented.

The storage hypervisor manages, virtualizes and controls all storage resources, allocating and providing the needed attributes (performance, availability) and services (automated provisioning, snapshots, replication), either directly or over a storage network, as required to serve the needs of each individual environment.

The term "hypervisor" within "storage hypervisor" is so named because it goes beyond a supervisor, [13] it is conceptually a level higher than a supervisor and therefore acts as the next higher level of management and intelligence that sits above and spans its control over device-level storage controllers, disk arrays, and virtualization middleware.

A storage hypervisor has also been defined as a higher level of storage virtualization [14] software, providing a "Consolidation and cost: Storage pooling increases utilization and decreases costs. Business availability: Data mobility of virtual volumes can improve availability. Application support: Tiered storage optimization aligns storage costs with required application service levels". [15] The term has also been used in reference to use cases including its reference to its role with storage virtualization in disaster recovery [16] and, in a more limited way, defined as a volume migration capability across SANs. [17]

Server vs. storage hypervisor

An analogy can be drawn between the concept of a server hypervisor and the concept of a storage hypervisor. By virtualizing servers, server hypervisors (VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Hypervisor, Linux KVM, Xen, z/VM) increased the utilization rates for server resources, and provided management flexibility by de-coupling servers from hardware. This led to cost savings in server infrastructure since fewer physical servers were needed to handle the same workload, and provided flexibility in administrative operations like backup, failover and disaster recovery.

A storage hypervisor does for storage resources what the server hypervisor did for server resources. A storage hypervisor changes how the server hypervisor handles storage I/O to get more performance out of existing storage resources, and increases efficiency in storage capacity consumption, storage provisioning and snapshot/clone technology. A storage hypervisor, like a server hypervisor, increases performance and management flexibility for improved resource utilization.

See also

Related Research Articles

Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. iSCSI facilitates data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. It can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.

In computing, paravirtualization or para-virtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to the virtual machines which is similar, yet not identical, to the underlying hardware–software interface.

A virtual storage area network is a logical representation of a physical storage area network (SAN). A VSAN abstracts the storage-related operations from the physical storage layer, and provides shared storage access to the applications and virtual machines by combining the servers' local storage over a network into a single or multiple storage pools.

In computer science, storage virtualization is "the process of presenting a logical view of the physical storage resources to" a host computer system, "treating all storage media in the enterprise as a single pool of storage."

Desktop virtualization is a software technology that separates the desktop environment and associated application software from the physical client device that is used to access it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VMware ESXi</span> Enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor for deploying and serving virtual computers

VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware, a subsidiary of Broadcom, for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel.

Virtual Iron Software, was located in Lowell, Massachusetts, sold proprietary software for virtualization and management of a virtual infrastructure. Co-founded by Alex Vasilevsky, Virtual Iron figured among the first companies to offer virtualization software to fully support Intel VT-x and AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization.

Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from the users, presenting instead an abstract computing platform. At its origins, the software that controlled virtualization was called a "control program", but the terms "hypervisor" or "virtual machine monitor" became preferred over time.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, network, servers, and virtualization. This service enables users to free themselves from maintaining an on-premises data center. The IaaS provider is hosting these resources in either the public cloud, the private cloud, or the hybrid cloud.

oVirt Free, open-source virtualization management platform

oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on x86-64, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in a future releases.

In computing, virtualization or virtualisation in British English is the act of creating a virtual version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.

In computer science, memory virtualization decouples volatile random access memory (RAM) resources from individual systems in the data centre, and then aggregates those resources into a virtualized memory pool available to any computer in the cluster. The memory pool is accessed by the operating system or applications running on top of the operating system. The distributed memory pool can then be utilized as a high-speed cache, a messaging layer, or a large, shared memory resource for a CPU or a GPU application.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenNebula</span> Cloud-computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed infrastructure

OpenNebula is an open source cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous data center, public cloud and edge computing infrastructure resources. OpenNebula manages on-premises and remote virtual infrastructure to build private, public, or hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service and multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to patch releases containing critical bug fixes but with no access to the regular EE maintenance releases. Upgrades to the latest minor/major version is only available for CE users with non-commercial deployments or with significant open source contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Converged storage</span>

Converged storage is a storage architecture that combines storage and computing resources into a single entity. This can result in the development of platforms for server centric, storage centric or hybrid workloads where applications and data come together to improve application performance and delivery. The combination of storage and compute differs to the traditional IT model in which computation and storage take place in separate or siloed computer equipment. The traditional model requires discrete provisioning changes, such as upgrades and planned migrations, in the face of server load changes, which are increasingly dynamic with virtualization, where converged storage increases the supply of resources along with new VM demands in parallel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">StarWind Software</span> American computer storage company

StarWind Software, Inc. is a privately held Beverly, Massachusetts-based computer software and hardware appliance company specializing in storage virtualization and software-defined storage.

VM-aware storage (VAS) is computer data storage designed specifically for managing storage for virtual machines (VMs) within a data center. The goal is to provide storage that is simpler to use with functionality better suited for VMs compared with general-purpose storage. VM-aware storage allows storage to be managed as an integrated part of managing VMs rather than as logical unit numbers (LUNs) or volumes that are separately configured and managed.

Software-defined data center is a marketing term that extends virtualization concepts such as abstraction, pooling, and automation to all data center resources and services to achieve IT as a service (ITaaS). In a software-defined data center, "all elements of the infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service."

ViPR Controller is a software-defined storage offering from EMC Corporation announced on May 6, 2013, at EMC World. ViPR abstracts storage from disparate arrays into a single pool of storage capacity that "makes it easier to manage and automate its own data-storage devices and those made by competitors." ViPR became generally available September 27, 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dell Technologies PowerFlex</span> Software-defined storage product

Dell Technologies PowerFlex, is a commercial software-defined storage product from Dell Technologies that creates a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local server storage using x86 servers. It converts this direct-attached storage into shared block storage that runs over an IP-based network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyper-converged infrastructure</span> Software infrastructure system

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of conventional "hardware-defined" systems. HCI includes, at a minimum, virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking. HCI typically runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers.

References

  1. ↑ Margaret Rouse. "Definition: software-defined storage". SearchSDN. Tech Target. Retrieved November 7, 2013.
  2. ↑ Chris Poelker (March 12, 2014). "The foundation of clouds: Intelligent abstraction".
  3. ↑ SNIA (March 2014). "Technical Whitepaper:Software Defined Storage".
  4. ↑ Archana Venkatraman. "Software-defined datacentres demystified". Computer Weekly . TechTarget . Retrieved November 7, 2013. The term software-defined datacentre (SDDC) rose to prominence this year during annual virtualisation conference VMworld 2012 [...] A software-defined datacentre is an IT facility where the elements of the infrastructure - networking, storage, CPU and security - are virtualised and delivered as a service. The provisioning and operation of the entire infrastructure is entirely automated by software.
  5. ↑ "The Software-Defined Data Center". company web site. VMware. Retrieved November 7, 2013.
  6. ↑ Margaret Rouse. "Definition: software-defined storage". SearchSDN. Tech Target. Retrieved November 7, 2013.
  7. ↑ "Technology Focus Areas | SNIA".
  8. ↑ "Thriving software-defined-storage market will ramp up to $86B by 2023: report". FierceTelecom. 20 March 2020. Retrieved 2020-03-23.
  9. ↑ "第二期观点｜天翼云存储资源盘活系统 HBlock，全面释放企业数据价值_云计算_InfoQ精选文章". www.infoq.cn. Retrieved 2024-04-16.
  10. ↑ Simon Robinson (March 12, 2013). "Software-defined storage: The reality beneath the hype". Computer Weekly. Retrieved November 7, 2013.
  11. ↑ "Comparison of virtualization technologies".
  12. ↑ Snyder, Brett; Ringenberg, Jordan; Green, Robert; Devabhaktuni, Vijay; Alam, Mansoor (June 9, 2014). "Evaluation and design of highly reliable and highly utilized cloud computing systems". Journal of Cloud Computing. 4: 12. doi: 10.1186/s13677-015-0036-6 . S2CID   17909593.
  13. ↑ "Hypervisor glossary definition" (PDF). Xen v2.0 for x86 Users' Manual (PDF). Xen.org on August 20, 2011. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 5, 2011. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  14. ↑ "SearchStorage.com definition". What is storage virtualization? Definition on SearchStorage.com.
  15. ↑ IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center. IBM Redbooks. 6 March 2015. ISBN   9780738440439.
  16. ↑ Erickson, Todd (June 23, 2011). "SearchDisasterRecovery Article". SearchDisasterRecovery.com. Archived from the original on October 4, 2017. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  17. ↑ Mearian, Lucas (November 23, 2010). "ComputerWorld Article". Archived from the original on October 4, 2017. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
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