Ten Things You Need to Know About Software-Defined Storage
With the rise of storage virtualization, the types of storage that any one vendor can manage really have no limit. Case in point is NetApp, which today not only extended its unified storage lineup but also announced that its storage virtualization software now works with third-party storage systems.
Nathan Moffitt, director of storage platform marketing for NetApp, says that in an age where data is becoming more mobile, IT organizations are looking for platforms that give them not only as much control over what data is stored where, but that can also enable them to meet service-level objects by guaranteeing quality of storage service.
To that latter end, NetApp has extended its unified storage lineup by taking advantage of the latest Intel processors to add three times as much Flash in the form of a new FAS8000 series storage system. The end result is a NetApp system that offers twice the level of performance of the previous generation of NetApp unified storage systems by delivering more than 2.6M IOPs of performance.
To manage these new capabilities and offerings, NetApp is also upgrading its clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system, which is the foundational component of NetApp’s software-defined storage architecture for managing data inside and out of the cloud.
Managing storage has become more complex than ever thanks to the rise of virtualization and the cloud. Obviously, the amount of data that needs to be managed is only going to increase, so the only real option is to find a better way to manage it.
