Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Traditional hardware storage has always brought three shackles to users:

Storage island, data is scattered in various types of storage devices, data sharing and flow has become a luxury

Storage management is extremely complex, multi-vendor supply strategy makes different manufacturers, different models of storage devices can not be unified management, storage management and configuration is still professional and complex

It is easy to be locked by manufacturers, and each storage manufacturer has its own data standard. As the amount of data increases, users are easily locked by hardware storage vendors.

Because of this, software-defined storage is considered to be a good solution to traditional storage problems. Software-defined storage gets rid of the shackles of proprietary hardware, based on general hardware, and makes the storage resource a shared pool without the restriction of physical system in the way of software, which greatly facilitates the management and utilization of storage.

But now, after four or five years of rapid development, software-defined storage, which is known as a traditional storage disruptor, has become an important part of the enterprise IT infrastructure, but it seems to have followed the old path of traditional hardware storage.

Go for a ride and go back to the old days? Let's first take a look at the real situation of the SDS market in recent years based on the 2018 Chinese SDS market data of a well-known consulting firm.

From the data of the consulting body, we can see that China's SDS market has maintained a very high growth rate in the past year or two, and more and more workloads are running on SDS. In addition to the early widely used VDI applications, applications such as HPC, database, cloud native, media streaming, VSS, archiving and other applications have begun to be deployed in the SDS environment, indicating that SDS is gradually becoming mature and accepted by more and more users.

However, from the perspective of market share, we can see that traditional storage companies seize the beach through OEM/ODM, mergers, acquisitions and other ways, and vaguely embark on the old road of big manufacturers dominating the world. In the foreign market, DELL EMC, VMware, NetApp and other established manufacturers have occupied an important position in the SDS market.

Take the Chinese market as an example, according to data from research institutions, such as Huawei, Chaodao, dawning, Xinhua 3, and DELL EMC all started their traditional storage business, and each of them basically maintained extremely high growth in 2018, while only Shanyan and XSKY data two startups in the forefront of the market, the market pattern seems to have returned to the era of traditional hardware storage.

The research institute gives the forecast of China's SDS market in the next five years. From the data, we can see that China's SDS market will still maintain a very high growth rate in the next five years. By 2023, the size of China's SDS market will be nearly three times that of 2018. Such a potential market determines that traditional storage manufacturers will certainly increase the strength of the market.

At the same time, we see that the functions of software-defined storage are becoming more and more standardized and universal, and the product differentiation between manufacturers is getting smaller and smaller compared with the initial stage of development. According to this development trend, the software-defined storage that let a hundred flowers blossom at the beginning seems to be following in the footsteps of the homogenization of traditional storage.

For these market phenomena, the author's views are not the same.

Storage software will become an irresistible trend after these developments, the compatibility of software-defined storage to the underlying hardware architecture will become more and more comprehensive. Moreover, most native manufacturers of software-defined storage actually put more emphasis on pure software solutions, which are more and more open and fully compatible with hardware. This can be seen from the gradual increase in the proportion of pure software versions of Nutanix in recent years, while the situation of domestic super-fusion manufacturers such as SmartX, which takes a pure soft route, and Shanyan, a software-defined storage manufacturer, is similar.

In addition, software-defined storage products with pure software version are more popular with medium and large users than integrated computers, because these users have greater demand for storage and strong technical capabilities. Decoupling storage through the pure software version is a rigid requirement. After the software and hardware are separated, SDS will bring huge benefits to customers after solving the compatibility problem:

Storage purchase will not be bound by a certain manufacturer, especially the purchase cost of hard drives and other accessories will be greatly reduced.

Data storage and management are all at the software level, rather than locking a specific hardware platform like traditional storage, let alone having to migrate data because of underlying hardware upgrades.

Faster deployment of new application technologies: new functions can be achieved through simple online software updates, which will make the entire storage system more flexible and lightweight, thus enjoying the advantages of the development of ARM, SSD and network technologies.

At present, from the changes of major storage manufacturers at home and abroad, we can easily support the above trend.

The view of NetApp, a well-known foreign storage company, on software-defined storage is: "in order to make software-defined storage truly dynamic, we must separate data access and data services from the hardware resource pool. By making data access separate from hardware, we will be able to provide storage according to service levels rather than hardware attributes." Therefore, starting from this year, NetApp strongly recommends Data ONTAP Select software-defined storage products, which can run on general-purpose servers, virtual machines, and even connect with its FAS series (traditional storage products) for data-level disaster recovery and unified data access.

Domestic, such as Shanyan data, is also the original manufacturer of pure software form. Its SDS is compatible with X86, Huawei ARM, Feiteng and other hardware platforms, and the functional features of the software are very innovative. In particular, the distributed object storage MOS product launched by the manufacturer can support server, traditional NAS and optical storage as hardware storage platform at the same time. Data is automatically transferred between NAS, X86 server and optical storage according to the needs and costs of business, and a unified namespace is realized. The business only needs to pay attention to data. Without paying attention to the specific hardware form, it can more reasonably take into account the performance and cost of data storage, as well as the protection of existing investment, and can greatly simplify business system development.

Application perception makes SDS out of the road of differentiation. At present, one of the most criticized points of SDS is more and more homogenization. If it is based on open source SDS products, some people will even say bluntly: "they are all modified by Ceph, basically the same." But will the truth really develop in this direction?

The author believes that SDS is still in the early stage of popularization and is in the stage of bridging the gap. As mentioned in the book Crossing the Gap, the so-called bridging the gap refers to the process of a technology / product realization leaping from early adopters to most early adopters. Bridging the gap means that more applications and scenarios are deployed on SDS, and more and more industry users will attach importance to SDS.

Because of this, we can see that this year's SDS market has actually shown a certain degree of differentiation, due to the storage software stripped from the proprietary hardware, the biggest change is to become more flexible. The major software-defined storage manufacturers begin to look for breakthroughs in their own superior industries, avoid direct competition with traditional storage hardware boxes, drive SDS to produce new features in some industry applications, and Offload the functions of applications to the bottom of storage, which not only accelerates the performance of data storage, but also effectively reduces the amount of data read frequently.

In fact, this year, software-defined storage products from companies such as Huawei, Chaochao and Shanyan have begun to emphasize the strong correlation between application perception and scenarios, and this trend will indeed enable SDS to add more industry attributes to some industries on the basis of general-purpose products, so as to be closer to users' applications. For example, some SDS products implement the "video clips quickly merge into large file interfaces" in the media assets industry. The traditional old way is to read fragments through the application layer and then write back to large files, which will lead to large-throughput operations in both the business layer and the storage layer, resulting in inefficient data storage. Using this interface, only the storage software can integrate the metadata, which greatly improves the efficiency of data processing.

We take Huawei's object storage service OBS 3.0 as an example, which has implemented the OBS Select function and provides SQL interface for data analysis and calculation of OBS objects. In big data's analysis scenario, you can directly OffLoad the Select query operation in the file to the storage layer, and the returned result is the result set that meets the query conditions, thus greatly reducing the bandwidth consumption of business hosts and storage.

Similarly, the MOS products of Shanyan data are widely used in the financial industry. Relying on the understanding and practice of the business of the financial industry, at the storage level, it optimizes the management of a large number of small files and solves the storage performance problems of a large number of small files. At the same time, combined with its own product metadata retrieval capability and AI content identification function, through a custom management template, data query and management functions with custom business capabilities are realized. Better meet the requirements of regulatory forensics and automatic compliance inspection in the financial industry.

Therefore, perceived application will be the most valuable and explored new trend of software-defined storage, and it will also become the biggest value point of product differentiation of software-defined storage. In particular, SDS is in the stage of crossing the gap. Only when it is closer to the business needs and helps industry users solve business problems, can it win the favor of more users and enhance the stickiness of SDS products among users. At the same time, some features that have just begun to be customized in some industries may become new standards in these industries through extensive deployment and use in the future, and then deploy to more users in a new way of generalizing product features. to achieve productization and replicability.

Therefore, the author believes that it is a general trend for software-defined storage to get rid of the shackles of hardware. At present, large and medium-sized enterprises have made adjustments to the procurement mode of software-defined storage, which shows that users have become more and more receptive to software-defined storage. It can be said that the competition in the software-defined storage market has only just begun.

In the future, storage is needed to be closer to the application, understand the application, perceive the application and serve the application. In this trend, software-defined storage + AI to perceive applications will bring unlimited imagination to the market. Therefore, software-defined storage will not follow the old road of traditional storage, and software-defined storage based on general purpose and closer to specific application scenarios will become the first choice for users in the market. it will also become the direction of innovation for software-defined storage manufacturers.

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