One of the main challenges faced by storage administrators is inefficient storage allocation and capacity usage. Before you know it, your primary storage gear fills up quickly requiring you to add more hardware, while adjacent storage equipment goes largely unused or under-utilized.
- When left unchecked, this ends up creating storage silos with unused capacity on some equipment, while others run out of disk space.
- When capacity is not balanced between devices, there could be excessive stress on a few devices causing performance bottlenecks, mechanical wear of disks, and budget overruns on capacity expansion and maintenance.
Address these challenges and reclaim every bit of stranded capacity by using DataCore Software-Defined Storage (SDS).
Challenges of siloed storage capacity management
Storage Virtualization and Capacity Pooling
DataCore SDS solutions virtualize the storage layer abstracting away the data services from the underlying hardware. Then, capacity across disparate storage equipment (different suppliers, models, etc.) are aggregated and pooled virtually. This enables the carving out of logical units of storage capacity from the pool and assigning to application servers.
DataCore SDS makes storage management more efficient with centralized visibility across all available capacity and shared resource allocation between different storage systems. Because storage from disparate hardware is managed as storage pools, DataCore SDS enables workloads to easily move between them to balance capacity usage. Additionally, users gain complete hardware flexibility and can customize the storage pool with the equipment of your choice based on performance, cost, scalability, data protection, and other factors. Easily offload data from existing gear to lower-cost hardware and free up space on primary storage.
DataCore pooling and balancing capacity
across diverse storage systems
Benefits of Storage Aggregation
- Vacant space on storage silos is made available for optimal utilization
- Resource provisioning is managed centrally at the storage pool level, which makes load balancing easier
- Gain the flexibility to expand the capacity of the storage pool with lower-cost hardware instead of more expensive alternatives
- Storage expansion expenses can be deferred until all available resources in the current infrastructure are fully utilized
- Prolong the value and usage of existing hardware during times of procurement and supply chain delay
- Storage utilization can be improved easily by thin-provisioning capacity from the storage pool
- Any storage hardware can be added, decommissioned, and changed non-disruptively and data can be migrated transparently between devices without affecting application access
- New technologies (flash, NVMe, Intel Optane, etc.) can be easily integrated into the storage infrastructure without impacting or disrupting the business
Storage Aggregation Solution from DataCore
- Create storage pools and aggregate storage capacity across heterogeneous storage devices
- Balance load, capacity, and throughput for maximum storage efficiency and performance
- Automatically tier data to the appropriate storage class based on data access frequency (hot/warm/cold)
- Optimize capacity utilization by deduplicating and compressing volumes
- Simplify and automate data storage management with a single software-defined storage solution instead of using multiple tools from different hardware suppliers
- Expand capacity or integrate new technologies into the storage infrastructure while maintaining operational continuity
- Reduce downtime and improve data availability
