Software Defined Storage is Disruptive

Earlier this month, EMC’s Chuck Hollis discussed two trends he noticed progressing in the storage technology space that he predicted would result in disruptive technology: the increasing presence of a software-defined data center, due to the fact that virtualization is a cost-effective method for expanding your resources without adding additional proprietary hardware, and the ever-increasing demand for storage.

I have to agree with Chuck. For some time now I have noticed the emergence of this market as well and believe there a great opportunity for a disruptive technology to make its move: a storage hypervisor that is hardware agnostic.

The savings virtualization creates is based upon the fact that all of the traditionally siloed functions of the data center, all on their own physical servers, can now be performed via layered software. To quote Hollis,

“It’s a simple proposition: the IT infrastructure components we typically think of as physical (storage, network, security, etc.) will soon be expressed as layered software, running in virtual machines, presumably on pools of industry-standard servers. Cost savings result from the use of standard servers. Resource efficiency results through the ability to pool resources. Operational efficiency results through managing integrated software entities vs. isolated physical ones. And agility results from being able to react quickly to new requirements. It’s a win-win-win-win. We’ve all seen how powerful this is with server virtualization, now we’re just expanding the concept to other forms of infrastructure to create the virtual data center.”

What it boils down to is that the storage industry is trending towards cost savings and efficiency through the use of software on industry-standard servers and commodity hard drives, reducing, or eventually eliminating, the current need for expensive, proprietary hardware and software solutions from folks like IBM, Dell, Hitachi and EMC (sorry Chuck). This is disruptive.

Fortunately, our company, Paragon Software Group is poised to take advantage of this industry dynamic with our partner Starwind Software Inc. we are offering a new solution – Paragon Starwind iSCSI SAN & NAS. Simply stated, iSCSI SAN & NAS is a storage hypervisor that turns any industry-standard Windows server into a reliable, fault-tolerant, and unified SAN and NAS, while taking advantage of “off the shelf” or existing storage devices and network infrastructure.

Its an exciting time in the storage space!