Virtualisation the reason for low adoption - and awareness - of software-defined storage

Advanced's Marc Beder claims that widespread adoption of server virtualisation made SDS redundant

The shift to fully virtualised environments - and to cloud computing - is the reason why organisations have not consciously adopted software-defined storage, as forecast by analysts, according to Marc Beder, head of pre-sales & solution architecture at fast-growing services firm Advanced.

In Computing Research published this week to coincide with the IT Leaders' Forum, where Beder was presenting, it was found that as many as three-quarters of all organisations don't deploy software-defined storage - and almost a quarter of respondents weren't even aware of the phrase.

The technology was developed in an effort to cut costs by improving utilisation of storage assets. Instead of being stuck with silos of poorly utilised storage attached to servers, software-defined storage promised to be able to utilise storage assets across the organisation, enabling organisations to provision and manage data storage based on policies.

However, according to Beder, software-defined storage has been undercut by the rapid advance of virtualisation and, latterly, the adoption of cloud computing.

"Software defined storage isn't necessarily a team of engineers - we don't have a team of engineers, coding and creating in the background. Instead, we leverage the software solutions that come with products to do what we need and the big one, really, is the ability to do external virtualisation," said Beder.

Software-defined storage wasn't really enough on its own to spark interest, though. It's only when organisations have shifted towards server virtualisation and, therefore, fully virtualised architectures that they have also seen the benefits of software-defined storage - but probably not even fully realised that is what it is. "When you virtualise, you only start to get the benefits of that software defined storage on legacy disks," said Beder.

Furthermore, the most recent storage platforms enable organisations - whether cloud providers, managed services providers like Advanced, or organisations themselves - to more easily implement such features as ‘encryption at rest'.

Such features will become increasingly important in terms of security, especially with the forthcoming implementation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation.

Computing's next IT Leaders' Forum will be NEXT WEEK - on 29 November. Attendence is free to qualifying IT professionals and decision makers. Find out more and sign-up here