To help clarify the market and reduce confusion, IDC has put a stake in the ground by clearly defining software-based storage and developing the industry's first comprehensive taxonomy supporting this definition. IDC's approach defines software-based storage as any storage software stack that can be installed on commodity resources (x86 hardware, hypervisors, or cloud) and/or off-the-shelf computing hardware. Furthermore, in order to qualify, software-based storage stacks should offer a full suite of storage services and federation between the underlying persistent data placement resources to enable data mobility of its tenants between these resources.
"Software-based storage will slowly but surely become a dominant part of every datacenter, either as a component of a software-defined datacenter or simply as a means to store data more efficiently and cost-effectively," said Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director, Storage Systems. "With a consistent and coherent set of definitions, suppliers can collectively help buyers realize the vision for SBS platforms."
Software-based storage platforms offer a compelling proposition for both incumbent and upcoming storage suppliers. It is in the long-term interest of incumbents to seize this opportunity to shed their hardware-centric mind frame and join the ranks of emerging start-ups to enable this paradigm shift. With the proliferation of SBS platforms, the delineation between hardware, software, and cloud storage suppliers will blur and eventually disappear.
"Software-based platforms will continue to grow faster than any other market segment in the file- and object-based storage market. This growth will primarily be driven by a rich and diverse set of data-intensive use cases across multiple industries and geographies," Nadkarni added.
The IDC study, IDC's Worldwide Software-Based (Software-Defined) Storage Taxonomy, 2013 (IDC #240500), provides IDC's assessment of software-based storage platforms, an approach for storage solutions that leverages commodity components to create a highly scalable storage platform — all in software.
To purchase this study, please contact IDC Sales at 508-988-7988 or sales@idc.com