Back to Enterprise Storage
An under-reported trend in storage these days is the mounting dissatisfaction with server-centric storage infrastructure as conceived by proprietary server hypervisor vendors and implemented as exclusive software-defined storage stacks. A few years ago, the hypervisor vendors seized on consumer anger around overpriced “value-add” storage arrays to insert a “new” modality of storage, so-called software-defined storage, into the IT lexicon. Touted as a solution for everything that ailed storage – and as a way to improve virtual machine performance in the process – SDS and hyper-converged infrastructure did rather well in the market. However, the downside of creating silo’ed storage behind server hosts was that storage efficiency declined by 10 percent or more on an enterprise-wide basis; companies were realizing less bang for the buck with software-defined storage than with the enterprise storage platforms they were replacing.
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