With much industry attention on "software- defined" infrastructures, organizations considering software-defined storage are faced with multiple approaches to using software to pool, aggregate, manage and share storage resources while providing high levels of data integrity, availability and scalability.

A software-defined environment leverages software, executing on industry-standard servers to pool and abstract hardware resources, thereby providing high levels of automation, flexibility and efficiency. It also enables convergence of compute and storage on the same set of standard servers.

Maxta, a developer of the VM-centric storage platform MxSP that turns standard servers into a converged compute and storage solution for virtualized environments, offers the following five tips for evaluating software-defined storage: 

1. Does Software-Defined Storage work?

Yes. Convergence of compute and storage and software-defined storage have been field-proven in leading companies - Facebook, Amazon, and Google, to name just a few. Yet, in many cases, software-defined storage was developed for specific workloads, mostly Big Data rather than for general enterprise workloads. With the rise in virtual infrastructures in environments of all sizes and the fact that server virtualization provides a natural platform for convergence, it's clear that the combination of server virtualization and software-defined storage is the direction for enterprise workloads.

2. Does Software-Defined Storage make sense for me?

Software-defined storage reduces costs and operational complexity while streamlining IT. It offers efficiency, simplicity, agility and availability benefits. There are few IT environments where these benefits are not desirable.

3. Am I capable of implementing Software-Defined Storage?

Software-defined storage is simple to implement and configure. It should be a seamless, plug-and-play integration in any virtualized environment, and should not require customization, day-to-day management, or any special storage/networking competency. In most cases, a single administrator can manage both compute and storage resources.

4. Can I use my existing storage and servers to deploy Software-Defined Storage?

Yes. Software-defined storage solutions should seamlessly co-exist with the existing infrastructure. You should be able to use your existing servers as the platform for software-defined storage and your existing storage arrays for all the applications that are already using them. Moreover, software-defined storage should be able to leverage existing storage arrays for capacity with all the benefits of managing all storage resources with a single-pane-of-glass console that manages storage assets as simply as VMs.

5. Do I have to sacrifice enterprise-class data services to implement Software-Defined Storage?

No. Software-defined storage implementations should provide all enterprise-class services, such as data sharing, live migration of virtual machines, dynamic load balancing, high availability, disaster recovery, snapshots, clones, thin provisioning, inline compression and data deduplication. These services should be delivered on industry standard servers alongside the server virtualization software and applications.

Maxta provides proven software-defined storage for any virtualized data center environment that is easy to implement and manage. The Maxta Storage Platform delivers significant capital and operational cost savings, while dramatically simplifying IT. It aggregates and converges dispersed compute and storage resources on standard commodity hardware, and provides all the enterprise-class capabilities required by the virtual data center.