Best Software-Defined Storage (SDS) for Startups - Page 2

The convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning is placing unprecedented requirements on storage solutions, as the input/output demands of these two distinct workloads diverge significantly. This shift is occurring at this very moment, with a recent analysis from the independent firm Intersect360 revealing that a striking 63% of current HPC users are actively implementing machine learning applications. Furthermore, Hyperion Research projects that, if trends continue, public sector organizations and enterprises will see HPC storage expenditures increase at a rate 57% faster than HPC compute investments over the next three years. Reflecting on this, Seymour Cray famously stated, "Anyone can build a fast CPU; the trick is to build a fast system." In the realm of HPC and AI, while creating fast file storage may seem straightforward, the true challenge lies in developing a storage system that is not only quick but also economically viable and capable of scaling effectively. We accomplish this by integrating top-tier parallel file systems into HPE's parallel storage solutions, ensuring that cost efficiency is a fundamental aspect of our approach. This strategy not only meets the current demands of users but also positions us well for future growth.

NetApp ONTAP Select provides powerful enterprise storage solutions that can be effortlessly implemented on your preferred commodity hardware within your own data center. By merging the agility and precise capacity scaling of cloud services with the flexibility, durability, and proximity of local storage, it creates a hybrid environment that is highly efficient. This system transforms a server’s internal disk drives, whether they are NVMe, SSD, or HDD, along with HCI and external array storage, into a nimble and adaptable storage infrastructure, delivering many advantages comparable to dedicated storage systems backed by NetApp® ONTAP® data management software. Users can quickly activate storage resources with cloud-like efficiency, transitioning from setup to active data serving in mere minutes. It allows for seamless data movement and replication, ensuring consistent management throughout your data fabric. You can dynamically increase capacity and enhance performance to align with evolving business requirements. Additionally, it supports Extreme Edge deployments, catering to mobile or autonomous vehicles, remote industrial settings, and tactical field operations, further extending its versatile applications. This makes it an ideal solution for organizations looking to optimize their storage strategy in various operational scenarios.

The IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) represents an advanced approach to software-defined storage, streamlining the deployment of fast and scalable storage solutions tailored for AI and big data applications. Utilizing cutting-edge NVMe storage technology that boasts low latency and impressive performance, alongside the expansive 8YB global file system and comprehensive data services offered by IBM Spectrum Scale, both the ESS 3200 and ESS 5000 nodes are capable of expanding to YB configurations within a unified global storage system that spans from edge to core data centers and extends to the public cloud. By integrating storage needs and removing silos across various platforms, such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, IBM ESS not only enhances efficiency but also lowers acquisition costs and simplifies the management of storage resources. This system is designed to support a variety of demanding workloads, ensuring that your organization maintains high performance across all operations. Furthermore, the flexibility and scalability of the IBM ESS make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to adapt to evolving data storage requirements.

GlusterFS is an adaptable network filesystem designed for high-demand applications, including cloud storage solutions and media streaming. This software is both free and open source, making it compatible with readily available hardware. It functions as a scalable, distributed file system that merges storage resources from various servers into a unified global namespace. Organizations have the flexibility to expand their capacity, performance, and availability as needed without being tied to a specific vendor, whether they operate on-premises, in the public cloud, or in hybrid settings. Many organizations across diverse sectors such as media, healthcare, government, education, web 2.0, and financial services have adopted GlusterFS for their production environments. The system is capable of scaling to several petabytes and efficiently managing thousands of clients while ensuring POSIX compatibility. It operates on standard commodity hardware and supports any on-disk filesystem that allows extended attributes. Furthermore, GlusterFS can be accessed via widely-used protocols like NFS and SMB, and it offers essential features including replication, quotas, geo-replication, snapshots, bitrot detection, and much more, ensuring data integrity and availability. Its versatility and robust capabilities make it a preferred choice for organizations looking to optimize their data storage solutions.

Red Hat® OpenShift® Data Foundation, formerly known as Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage, is a software-defined storage solution tailored for containers. Designed as the foundational data and storage services platform for Red Hat OpenShift, it enables teams to swiftly and effectively develop and deploy applications across various cloud environments. Even developers with minimal storage knowledge can easily provision storage directly through Red Hat OpenShift without needing to navigate away from their primary interface. Capable of formatting data in files, blocks, or objects, it caters to a diverse range of workloads generated by enterprise Kubernetes users. Additionally, our specialized technical team is available to collaborate with you to devise a strategy that aligns with your storage requirements for both hybrid and multicloud container deployments, ensuring that your infrastructure is optimized for performance and scalability.

We assist our clients in attaining exceptional efficiency and cost reductions for their private cloud or public cloud storage services. Through our innovative software-defined block storage solution, Lightbits, businesses can effortlessly expand their operations, enhance IT workflows, and cut expenses—all at the speed of local flash technology. This solution breaks the traditional ties between computing and storage, allowing for independent resource allocation that brings the flexibility and efficacy of cloud computing to on-premises environments. Our technology ensures low latency and exceptional performance while maintaining high availability for distributed databases and cloud-native applications, including SQL, NoSQL, and in-memory systems. As data centers continue to expand, a significant challenge remains: applications and services operating at scale must remain stateful during their migration within the data center to ensure that services remain accessible and efficient, even amid frequent failures. This adaptability is essential for maintaining operational stability and optimizing resource utilization in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Burlywood FlashOS™ represents a groundbreaking flash storage architecture that assesses application behavior right at the flash controller level, optimizing SSD performance and features to align seamlessly with the specific needs of applications, ultimately providing tangible advantages for customers utilizing cloud storage, all-flash arrays, and hyper-converged solutions. Our specialized FlashOS™ controller technology paves the way for the next generation of SSDs designed specifically for data centers. It is the first software-defined SSD solution tailored for the complexities of modern cloud applications. By offering in-depth analysis and insights into your storage environment, we empower you with a flexible software business model that ensures control over both the supply chain and costs involved. This solution stands out as the only adaptable, application-centric option available for storage needs, backed by comprehensive technical and strategic support throughout all stages of its lifecycle. In a rapidly evolving landscape, legacy storage systems are simply unable to meet the demands of today’s intricate cloud applications. Therefore, organizations must evolve their storage strategies to remain competitive and efficient.

StoneFly's StoneFusion™ converts bare-metal systems into a comprehensive enterprise solution that includes iSCSI SAN, NAS, S3 object storage, or a unified storage appliance, complete with built-in ransomware defense, storage optimization features, and data monitoring services. Additionally, StoneFusion can be utilized within Azure, AWS, and the StoneFly cloud environments, providing flexibility for various deployment needs.

VaultFS, created by Swiss Vault Global, is a sophisticated data archiving solution aimed at delivering outstanding data durability, scalability, and efficiency tailored for prolonged storage requirements. Utilizing advanced erasure coding techniques, VaultFS fragments data into pieces with additional redundant components, dispersing them across multiple storage sites to facilitate reconstruction, even in cases where some fragments become lost or damaged. This strategy effectively reduces hardware overhead, leading to lower upfront costs and diminished ongoing maintenance expenses. With a peer-to-peer architecture, VaultFS removes any single points of failure, while its automated regeneration features swiftly recover corrupted data, guaranteeing uninterrupted access. Additionally, the system's flexible configuration supports effortless scalability, allowing organizations to integrate extra disks or nodes without hindering operations. As a result, VaultFS emerges as a dependable and cutting-edge option for businesses in search of superior data storage solutions that can adapt to their evolving needs. This ensures that organizations can confidently manage their valuable data assets over time.

StorPool provides a fully managed primary storage platform that businesses can use to host mission-critical workloads from their own datacenters. We make it easy to convert standard servers with NVMe SSDs to high-performance, linearly scaling primary storage systems. StorPool is a superior alternative for high-end SANs or All-Flash Arrays (AFA) and mid-range SANs for companies building private or public clouds. StorPool is more reliable, agile, faster, and more cost-effective than other primary storage products. It is a great replacement for legacy storage architectures such as mid- or high-end primary arrays. Your cloud computing offering will deliver exceptional performance, reliability, and a higher ROI.

SwiftStack is a versatile data storage and management solution designed for applications and workflows that rely heavily on data, enabling effortless access to information across both private and public infrastructures. Its on-premises offering, SwiftStack Storage, is a scalable and geographically dispersed object and file storage solution that can begin with tens of terabytes and scale to hundreds of petabytes. By integrating your current enterprise data into the SwiftStack platform, you can enhance accessibility for your contemporary cloud-native applications without the need for another extensive storage migration, utilizing your existing tier 1 storage effectively. SwiftStack 1space further optimizes data management by distributing information across various clouds, both public and private, based on operator-defined policies, thereby bringing applications and users closer to their needed data. This system creates a unified addressable namespace, ensuring that data movement within the platform remains seamless and transparent to both applications and users alike, enhancing the overall efficiency of data access and management. Moreover, this approach simplifies the complexities associated with data handling in multi-cloud environments, allowing organizations to focus on their core operations.

Stratoscale empowers IT departments to function as internal cloud service providers, facilitating the on-demand and single-click acquisition of resources along with managed open-source technologies, thus enabling a response time comparable to that of public cloud services. Their multi-cloud hybrid platform offers a genuine infrastructure-as-a-service experience, making it particularly beneficial for DevOps practices and Infrastructure-as-Code automation. With a unified panel for monitoring and scaling all resources and services, as well as automating the complete lifecycle of open-source technologies, IT teams can concentrate more on innovation tailored to business needs, as well as on governance and compliance. APIs are the most effective method for utilizing open-source technologies; however, the varying APIs across different cloud environments create added complexity, which hinders DevOps professionals from achieving their full capabilities. Stratoscale addresses this challenge by providing both Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), simplifying the management and deployment of applications across various platforms. This innovative approach allows organizations to harness the power of cloud technologies while streamlining their operational efficiency.

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is designed to meet the challenges of contemporary IT by providing a multi-tenant, hyper-converged infrastructure solution dedicated to cyber protection. This solution not only decreases total cost of ownership (TCO) but also enhances productivity through a reliable IT infrastructure that efficiently handles disaster recovery tasks and secures backup data. Optimized for seamless integration with Acronis Cyber Cloud’s range of products, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure caters to various business models by decoupling software from hardware and offering adaptable licensing options, including a pay-as-you-go feature. It ensures operational continuity by monitoring systems proactively, allowing for troubleshooting before issues affect end-users or external systems. With user-friendly management and monitoring capabilities, this solution tackles data integrity challenges, safeguarding your information with Acronis CloudRAID and Acronis Notary, which utilize blockchain technology to authenticate data. Ultimately, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure empowers organizations to maintain robust cyber protection and operational efficiency, ensuring peace of mind in an increasingly digital landscape.

A combination of significant technological advancements and commercial trends is driving the need for an innovative approach to high-performance input/output operations. The emergence of various non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies is expanding alongside rapidly growing media capacities. Additionally, the adoption of diverse many-core processor architectures is resulting in increased I/O demands and more complex I/O requirements. Emerging high-value business sectors are leveraging analytics and machine learning, further pushing the limits of performance capabilities. Conventional file systems struggle to efficiently handle flash storage at scale, while the performance of hard disk drives diminishes with higher levels of concurrency. In this context, IME offers consistent job performance, enhances computation for data sets that exceed memory limits, accelerates I/O-heavy applications, and provides a reliable, cost-effective, and space-efficient solution for managing fluctuating data loads. This new paradigm is essential for meeting the challenges posed by modern data processing needs.

DDN and Tintri's IntelliFlash systems merge high-performance capabilities with cost-effectiveness to create a fully functional intelligent storage infrastructure that independently fine-tunes SSD-to-HDD ratios while offering scalable performance. The management features are designed to save time and provide superb support for enterprise applications, allowing for the consolidation of diverse workloads with simultaneous multiprotocol support for block, file, object storage, and virtual machines, all on a unified platform. Additionally, these systems improve cost-efficiency through advanced data reduction technologies, quick backup solutions, robust disaster recovery options, and powerful analytics software that accelerates data insights. Furthermore, DDN's A³I solution effectively tackles the challenges of unstructured data management, addressing the demands of data-heavy applications. This architecture not only supports unstructured data but also enhances the performance and scalability for structured data types, including call and transaction records as well as consumer behavior analytics, ensuring that organizations can efficiently manage a broad spectrum of data. As a result, businesses can achieve enhanced operational efficiency while maintaining flexibility in their storage solutions.

Microsoft Azure StorSimple is designed to cater to the requirements of applications that prioritize performance and capacity, offering a comprehensive hybrid cloud storage solution tailored for enterprises. It combines the advantages of physical arrays suited for data center deployments with virtual arrays ideal for smaller enterprise settings such as branch offices that necessitate network-attached storage (NAS). This on-demand infrastructure alleviates the need for expensive on-premises equipment for specialized projects or new initiatives. Additionally, by leveraging local storage to enhance performance, users have the option to keep all volume data stored locally, ensuring quicker access. Effectively manage your data growth with StorSimple’s capability to automatically archive inactive primary data from local servers to the cloud, facilitating seamless capacity expansion. Furthermore, you can eliminate the necessity for distinct backup systems by utilizing cloud snapshots that ensure off-site data protection, while also removing the requirement for remote data replication to a secondary data center through cloud storage solutions. This innovative approach not only streamlines data management but also enhances operational efficiency across the board.