Storage Platforms
It's no secret organizations today are dealing with data growth up to and beyond the petabyte level. This massive growth magnifies data management challenges, such as the overheads associated with storage acquisition and operation, as well as exacerbated data protection, governance, and security concerns due to regulatory issues and data mobility.
There are a number of choices to select from when building storage that will scale out to petabyte levels, as well as meet the needs of local and mobile users. Three choices are object storage (OBS), software-defined storage (SDS), and a newer technology approach that is quickly gaining traction within the industry -- data defined storage (DDS).
Storage Platforms
Object Storage
Unlike traditional approaches, object storage does not use a file system hierarchy to store data. Data is stored as objects and every object is assigned its own unique identifier. Users retrieve the stored data object using a unique "claim check" code; its actual location on physical media is abstracted within the pool of storage. This architecture allows for virtually unlimited scalability of the virtual storage pool.
The use of objects removes standard network file-sharing protocol access. Users generally access object storage through applications that use a REST API. This makes object storage ideal for all online, cloud environments.
Software Defined Storage
Software-defined storage environments enable virtualized storage pools to manage siloed data across geographic sites and provide policy data management related to storage optimization, which reduces the cost of storage and storage administration, offering various options such as deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.
To a great extent, storage has always been defined by software; it's just that the software has normally been embedded into proprietary hardware platforms creating a storage appliance. With software-defined storage, it is abstracted to commodity hardware through storage virtualization software that reduces TCO and enhances infrastructure flexibility.
Data Defined Storage
Data-defined storage unifies all data repositories and exposes globally distributed data stores through the global namespace, eliminating data silos and improving storage utilization.
In addition to media independent data storage, data-defined storage includes two other attributes: data security and identity management, delivering end-to-end information governance, protection, retention management, security and mobility; and distributed metadata repository, capturing the value of data across distributed data stores by collecting all basic metadata and custom metadata and conducting full-text indexing and filtering of all standard and industry-specific files.