Software Definition re-engineering storage

Source: Internet
Author: User

With elastic storage, IBM enables software-defined storage to be implemented. Software-defined storage is as powerful as rock-roll, it will have a huge impact on the traditional storage market, and reshape storage by optimizing Storage Security, speed, cost, delivery, and other aspects.

"Rock, storage !" In September 4, at the "Create a Storage Rock Festival for the big data age", IBM shouted such a slogan. This also vividly reflects that in the cloud computing era, storage is undergoing new changes, and software-defined storage is likely to become a watershed, it brings excitement to the storage market just like rock music brings shock to people.

 Software Defined storage concept gradually formed

The formation of the IBM software-defined storage concept has a gradually clear and mature process. I remember that at the beginning of 2013, when the concept of software-defined storage emerged, IBM immediately recognized the concept and expressed its ability to provide software-defined storage. At that time, people had different understandings of the concept of software-defined storage, and even caused a heated debate. Some people think that Software Defined storage is a new kind of old wine, while some vendors are committed to introducing a new type of Software Defined storage products. According to the statement issued by IBM at that time, IBM's understanding of software-defined storage also stays at the macro level, with no support for specific products or implementation strategies.

However, at the IBM Edge Conference held in October 2013, IBM has already elaborated on the concept of software-defined storage and explained the technology related to software-defined storage, released a roadmap for IBM software-defined storage. In IBM's plan, the development of software-defined storage can be divided into three stages: Stage 1 mainly realizes storage virtualization and optimizes workload; the focus of Phase 1 is to achieve openness and scalability of the storage platform on the basis of Storage Virtualization; Stage 3 is to make the storage platform more open and more prominent in analysis, through smart-Driven Data Management, applications can dynamically allocate and manage storage resources. The software-defined Storage Field Theory clarifies the development path of IBM software-defined storage, allowing people to see the future development direction of software-defined storage for the first time.

Although the three paragraphs of software-defined storage describe the development direction of software-defined storage, IBM still has a lot to do with specific products that can be implemented. In this rock and roll festival for recreating storage in the big data age, IBM focused on the topic of software-defined storage and announced a series of software-defined storage products, and claims that many users have benefited from their software-defined storage products and solutions.

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 Software Defined storage solves big data problems

IBM closely associates software-defined storage with the development of big data. "In the big data era, the increasing data volume, diversified data types, and the demanding requirements of users for data access, analysis, and application have overwhelmed traditional data storage and management ." Guo rensheng, vice president of IBM Greater China and general manager of systems and science and technology, said, "The software-defined storage we provide to our customers has incomparable advantages in terms of speed, scalability, and cost."

After IBM sold its X86 server business, many people have doubts about whether IBM will continue to invest in hardware in the future. Guo rensheng made it clear that in the future, IBM will continue to invest in high-end servers and storage. IBM will invest $3 billion in the Development of next-generation chips. According to Gartner's report, in 2013, the IBM flash memory system ranked first in the world. In May 19, 2014, IBM released software-defined storage products for the first time in the world. IBM hopes to recreate storage in the big data era through software-defined storage and related flash and storage virtualization, this allows storage to take another step in terms of security, speed, cost, and delivery.

Mobile, social, and big data analysis and applications require the support of software-defined storage. Software-defined storage can provide elastic capacity, change the data economy, and enable customers to achieve higher business value at a lower cost. According to a survey conducted by IBM, 78% of respondents said that the storage pressure is concentrated on cost control and efficiency. only 1/5 of customers have an efficient IT infrastructure, most of the customer's spending on storage is unnecessary. The main bottleneck for deploying cloud applications in 58% of enterprises lies in insufficient storage supply and poor management. IBM believes that software-defined storage is capable of solving the above problems.

Laura guio, global vice president of the emerging market storage business of IBM systems and the Ministry of Science and Technology, believes that software-defined storage is a series of software functions that automatically manage local and global data, they provide ground-breaking data access speeds, simpler management, and faster and more economical expansion of the technical infrastructure as the data volume increases. IBM named its software-defined storage "elastic storage ). IBM elastic storage technology delivers exceptional performance and almost unlimited scalability, and can reduce storage costs by up to 90% by automatically moving data to the most economical storage device.

IBM Watson systems that often compete with humans use elastic storage technology. In a competition named dangerous edge, the IBM Watson system used 0.2 billion pages of structured and unstructured data, equivalent to 5 TB of storage capacity, it takes only a few minutes to load the "knowledge" into IBM elastic storage. A test by the IBM Research Institute also proves that its elastic storage can scan 10 billion files in a single system within 43 minutes and be used for in-depth data mining.

For software-defined storage, various storage vendors are exploring the road. Each Vendor develops and continuously introduces new technologies based on their understanding of software-defined storage and their storage technical expertise, it also actively verifies the feasibility of its software-defined storage solution through various channels. While innovating the software-defined storage technology, IBM also helped Beijing fortong Oriental Technology Co. Ltd. establish an e-lab and deploy a full set of IBM software-defined storage architectures, the purpose is to target emerging applications such as big data analysis, mobile analytics, and social networking, provides customers and partners with services such as basic architecture design and testing, demonstration of new technology solutions, concept prototype verification, and performance indicator testing, this helps customers quickly deploy more flexible, scalable, and efficient infrastructure platforms.

"The IBM storage systems deployed in our e-lab mainly include IBM elastic storage, Storwize series storage, high-end ds8000 storage systems, and Flash system all-flash storage arrays, its processing capability is equivalent to that of a provincial financial institution's IT system, and is also the largest software-defined storage environment in Asia." Jin Wei, chief technology officer of Beijing Futong Oriental Technology Co., Ltd., said, "The Spirit of rock music is to break the conventional, and software-defined storage also has the ability to break the conventional storage. The infrastructure of software-defined storage provides it flexibility, efficiency, and elasticity required for business innovation. Through e-lab, we and IBM will integrate resources from both parties to build a software-defined platform for customers and partners ."

  Software Defined storage has been deployed

Laura guio summarizes the features of IBM elastic storage.

First, based on IBM gpfs, IBM elastic storage is an integrated data governance tool with online storage management and massive data volumes. It can greatly improve the storage performance by using the flash memory embedded in the server.

Second, IBM elastic storage virtualizes storage and allows multiple systems and applications to share a public storage pool. This helps achieve transparent global data storage without modifying applications and Changing Storage Management.

Third, IBM elastic storage can automatically and intelligently migrate data to the most economical storage device to achieve storage layering and reduce costs.

Fourth, IBM elastic storage has better openness. For example, supporting openstack management software can help customers store, manage, and access data across private, public, and hybrid clouds, global data sharing and collaboration. In addition to openstack, IBM elastic storage also supports other open APIs, including POSIX and hadoop.

"Our elastic storage can automatically balance resources while supporting different workloads ." "Our software-defined storage software can run on any server and can be scaled in and out without restrictions, while being open, automatic Data governance can be achieved on different media such as flash memory, disks, and tapes." In the third quarter of 2014, IBM elastic storage will support cloud deployment on softlayer.

IBM software-defined storage is a commercially available solution. China Petroleum Orient geophysical Corporation and Ping An Insurance have deployed IBM Software Defined storage solutions. For example, Ping An Insurance reduced the construction cycle of a massive data summary system from one month to one hour based on the IBM software-defined storage solution, and reduced the data aggregation time to half of the original time, it better meets increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. Ping An Insurance believes that software-defined storage must be standardized, automated, and intelligent. While using IBM software-defined storage solutions, Ping An Insurance is impressed with ibm svc virtualization technology, integrated storage architecture, and block storage data de-duplication features.

This article from the "Guo Tao's storage world" blog, please be sure to keep this source http://gtstorageworld.blog.51cto.com/908359/1553044

Software Definition re-engineering storage

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