One of the biggest challenges faced by organizations is the complexity of managing ever-growing storage environments. Modern applications, both on-premises and in the cloud, are also becoming more complex and are often consuming storage from multiple systems creating security challenges and basic management challenges as storage appliances and clusters are managed in silos across the globe.
We sat with Steve Umbehocker, CEO and Founder of OSNEXUS to ask him some questions about how the Software Defined Storage space is evolving and to get some insights on how OSNEXUS is working to address the challenges of storage complexity and scale.
Q: What are companies doing today to reduce the complexity of their IT environments, and how does Software Defined Storage (SDS) fit in?
Steve: When you have 10s or 100s of storage appliances is gets expensive to manage and maintain for small and large IT organizations alike. Software Defined Storage is a powerful tool for IT administrators as it enables them to use their commodity server hardware interchangeably for compute and storage.
Q: We’ve heard the mention of hyper-scale SDS, what constitutes hyper-scale and where is it needed?
Steve: Hyper-scale storage architectures allow you to expand on demand and essentially without limit. This means new storage appliances can be added to a cluster or multi-site cluster to grow an environment from small scale to 10s or soon 100s of petabytes of storage.
Q: How is OSNEXUS working to reduce the complexity of storage management?
This technology at the heart of our SDS platform, storage grids, span sites and datacenters so all of an IT organization’s storage systems can be managed and provisioned from a single web browser. Within a storage grid, companies can deploy scale-out file, block, and object storage.
Q: How do open-source file-system technologies fit into Software Defined Storage?
There are some fantastic enterprise file-systems in the open source. So rather than developing a new, untested proprietary file system, OSNEXUS has integrated Ceph, GlusterFS, and ZFS into the QuantaStor SDS platform. We then contribute our changes back to the open-source community.
Flexible Software Defined Storage Technology
QuantaStor, OSNEXUS’ flagship product, is a unified Software Defined Storage platform designed to scale up and out to make storage management easy while reducing overall enterprise storage costs. QuantaStor SDS, deployed in datacenters worldwide, addresses a broad set of storage use cases including Server Virtualization, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and High-performance Applications through scale-out physical and virtual storage appliances.
According to CEO Steve Umbehocker, “Our SDS platform has unique grid scale-out technology that eliminates storage “silo” type configurations found with traditional storage software by enabling customers to link all their storage appliances together on-premises and across sites and datacenters to form a storage grid that can be easily managed by a small IT team at hyper-scale.”
In the future, OSNEXUS envisions more and more customers choosing to get a fractional storage array that’s a virtual storage appliance. They also see elastic search as being the next storage opportunity just as S3/SWIFT object storage protocols entered into the storage landscape with NAS and SAN protocols. That’s going to enable a broad set of additional use cases for scale-out storage and will enable their customers to analyze data and extract business intelligence and more value out of their data assets.
