Open Storage Platform – Why Now? – StorageSoup Blog by Randy Kerns

By , Thursday, November 12th 2015

Categories: Analyst Blogs

Tags: blog, open storage, osp, Randy Kerns, Storage Soup,

OSP v. Traditional NEWWhile it’s nothing new for information technologists to look at alternatives for their infrastructure, there seems to be more interest in that today than ever before.

There is so much interest that it becomes more important than ever to understand and effectively communicate the alternatives. Most of the interest today is around building private clouds or adding a special purpose system for analytics. Driving the investigation is the fact they must scale storage massively, and that can make costs soar. I have written an introductory Industry Insight report that can be accessed here.

Existing environments are unlikely to change because the current business operations must continue without disruption or introducing risk. However, pressures from executives and peer companies place a greater focus on examining and evaluating alternatives for storage at scale for new deployments. . The pressure can be so great that IT often must report progress to executives on initiatives for deploying these new environments. In response, many pilot programs have started that include evaluating new technology.

These pressures around adding storage that scales without costing too much has led many to evaluate on Open Storage Platform (OSP).

An OSP consists of hardware and the software used to create a storage system that can scale and share data for access by applications written to work in a federated environment. This is usually called a cloud.

The hardware invariably is Intel-based servers with attached storage. The attached storage can be internal solid-state drives or hard disk drives, but can also include direct attached enclosures with disks or flash devices. The software provides the storage function for accessing and managing data, including potential data services such as copy and replication for data protection. This is often called software defined storage, but I prefer “software-based storage” because that term has not been overused and over-hyped.

Storage-based software includes EMC ScaleIO, NetApp Cloud Ontap, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, VMware VSAN and DataCore SANsymphony-V. OSP hardware includes Intel servers with storage acceleration features, SanDisk InfiniFlash and X-IO ISE.

For large organizations, building a storage infrastructure from OSP elements could cost substantially less than purchasing a complete storage system from established vendors. But the investment IT must make in staffing, space, and related infrastructure may go way beyond original plans. Building and integrating storage systems adds risk and requires storage engineers more than administrators. Long-term support requires retaining these people. There must be a strategy for any project to develop a storage infrastructure.

This is the reason Evaluator Group is covering the OSP products and strategies. The questions coming from IT have been great enough to realize the need to carefully evaluate the options required for a successful deployment.

Read the full blog at TechTarget

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