EXPERT SPEAK
Christian Putz, Director, EEMEA, Pure Storage.
A good example is the way data is
protected on your standard hard drive.
Having a single physical disk means that if
there is a mechanical failure of that disk,
your data is lost. Using Redundant Array
Independent Disks (RAID) protects data by
having multiple copies of the data spread
across several physical disks, along with
parity checking, which is used to recreate
the data in the event of a disk failure.
Traditional storage solutions utilise ‘hot
spare’ disks that are idle while waiting for a
failure to occur, to rebuild the lost data on
the disk, using the parity information.
Instead of providing availability at the
physical disk layer, a more efficient and
reliable storage method is via hardware
like Solid State Drives (SSDs). Being much
less prone to failure allows for RAID to
be abstracted from the physical disk into
segments (that include parity), which are
spread across multiple SSDs within the
storage array. The key benefit is that in
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the event of an SSD failure, only the data
in use on the SSD is rebuilt from parity in
minutes as opposed to the whole physical
disk that can take days.
Providing these capabilities in software
means vendors can be much more agile in
how they offer new features to customers.
The ability to complete that upgrade non-
disruptively in business hours, and on a
repeatable basis, helps build confidence
within a customer. This process takes time
and resources, but software defined means
skilled support staff can monitor the
change and any back-up or maintenance
requirements remotely. This reduces
operational costs for staff, who no longer
need to work weekends or evenings to
complete storage maintenance.
Another important benefit of software
defined is that changing the components
comprising the storage solution doesn’t
impact the system’s availability. You can
start your investment small and grow into
it over time, without any disruption to
the business. This creates a subscription
style model where customers only buy
what they need, as they need it. As
requirements and capacity planning
forecasts change, you can introduce
additional components to scale capacity or
performance independently.
Gone are the days of sizing a solution
for three to five years and building as
much scale into the configuration from
the beginning, to get the best price from a
vendor. This process has traditionally been
fraught with uncertainties: is the solution
sized correctly for the performance/capacity
I need for the lifecycle of these assets? Did
the architects take my unknown changing
business requirements into consideration
when sizing the solution? Will I be required
to pay a huge ongoing maintenance fee
to keep the solution supported after
the warranty expires? What if I want
to push the asset beyond its intended
lifecycle? What if that lifecycle could be 10
years instead of five? Will I be forced to
repurchase the solution again and have to
repeat the whole process?
Software defined means you are able
to change every component in the storage
solution non-disruptively, without any
impact to the availability or performance of
production applications. When new storage
technologies are introduced – for example,
NVMe – they can easily be integrated
into the existing solution. You won’t be
required to upgrade to storage product 2.0
and repurchase storage capacity already
owned, not to mention the skills, resources
and financial investment required to
migrate data to the new platform.
Not only does SDS prove valuable
for your IT team by saving time that can
be redeployed back into the business
but, more importantly, it supports the
overall growth of your organisation. It’s
clear that software defined is the future of
infrastructure components and we haven’t
even started looking at how this impacts
orchestration/automation. ¢
Issue 06
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS