Andy Gremett
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Product Solutions Marketing
January 14, 2025
Part 1 of a 3-part series
IT teams are increasingly tasked with supporting the unprecedented growth in data across their organizations. Businesses are constantly seeking innovative solutions to manage their growing data needs efficiently and cost-effectively. Software-defined storage (SDS) is seen as a game-changer and competitive edge for many teams, offering unprecedented flexibility and scalability.
Consider this: How many great ideas have been put on hold because your storage couldn't keep up? How many market opportunities have slipped by while your team wrestled with inflexible systems?
It's time to see if your current setup is helping or hindering your success.
In this first of a three-part blog series, we will cover some common use cases for software-defined storage solutions including application development and testing, distributed applications and cloud migration. By examining these scenarios, you'll gain insights into how SDS can streamline operations, enhance performance and pave the way for data transformation technologies in your organization.
Many application dev and test teams are bogged down by “glacially” slow provisioning, complicated management and inflexible storage systems. These roadblocks don't just eat up time; they can add weeks or even months to your development cycle. And dev and test time is money.
But it's not just about the extra costs. Without flexible storage solutions, your team might find themselves stuck in the slow lane while competitors speed ahead. In today's market, falling behind on innovation isn't just frustrating; it could mean missing out on crucial opportunities.
Enhancing Development with Software-Defined Storage
Software-defined storage offers unique benefits for application development and testing environments. First and foremost, it accelerates application development cycles by providing developers on-demand, flexible storage resources. Using policy-as-code (PaC) based criteria, developers, testers and even DevOps applications, CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) can request and be granted resources on demand (using APIs). This agility allows teams to quickly spin up test environments, iterate faster, and reduce time to market for new applications. The elasticity that comes with the ability to rapidly provision and de-provision storage as needed eliminates bottlenecks and empowers developers to work more efficiently. This efficiency can reduce costs with better resource utilization and increase availability, as well.
Additionally, SDS maximizes infrastructure flexibility by decoupling storage management from hardware constraints. This abstraction enables IT teams to easily reconfigure storage resources to meet changing project requirements without disrupting ongoing development work. Lastly, SDS optimizes storage efficiency through features like thin provisioning, data compression (2:1 data reduction through compression) and automated tiering. These capabilities ensure that development and testing environments consume only the necessary resources, leading to significant cost savings and improved resource utilization across the organization.
Maximizing Data Management: Integration, Efficiency and Flexibility
Software-defined storage solutions like Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) SDS offer compelling advantages for specific data management and storage use cases. A key strength is their smooth integration with existing storage portfolios, allowing IT teams to continue to use their current investments in x86 servers while gradually transitioning to a more modern and flexible infrastructure. Advanced data efficiency features, including thin provisioning and snapshots, enable businesses to optimize resource utilization and reduce costs significantly. These features, combined with data compression and polyphase erasure coding, ensure that dev/test teams have access to the resources they need, while ensuring data protection.
Rapid provisioning and elasticity are a direct benefit of SDS architectures, providing a distinct edge for teams working in fast-paced development cycles. Teams can quickly spin up and down storage resources as needed, responding to project demands with unmatched agility. This agility extends to high availability features and hybrid cloud mobility, ensuring that critical data and applications remain accessible and protected across diverse environments.
By enabling seamless data movement between on-premises and cloud infrastructures, SDS solutions allow organizations to adopt hybrid and multicloud strategies, enhancing both operational resilience and strategic adaptability in a rapidly changing tech landscape. This flexibility allows businesses to optimize their data placement based on performance, cost and compliance requirements, while also making workload migration easier.
Common Use Cases and Workloads
SDS solutions truly shine when it comes to rapidly provisioning and de-provisioning app development and testing environments. Teams can quickly set up isolated storage spaces for different projects or testing scenarios. Administrators can create storage pools with specific performance characteristics, ensuring that each dev/test environment has the appropriate resources without overprovisioning.
Tip: Create a library of SDS templates tailored to common development scenarios. These should include predefined storage configurations, performance tiers and data protection policies. This can reduce provisioning time and ensure consistency.
SDS solutions seamlessly integrate with CI/CD pipelines, using APIs. It allows for automated storage provisioning as part of the build and test processes. This integration enables teams to spin up complete application stacks, including storage, for each build or test run. SDS's ability to quickly create and tear down storage environments aligns perfectly with the rapid iteration cycles of CI/CD workflows.
Tip: When integrating software-defined storage with CI/CD pipelines, focus on using API-driven storage orchestration. This allows for seamless automation and integration with popular CI/CD tools. APIs that cover provisioning and snapshots, as well as lifecycle scripts and cleanup routines, can reduce manual intervention and improve resource utilization.
There are many more examples of SDS application dev and testing use cases and workloads.
SDS Benefits for Cloud Dev/Test Environments
A software-defined storage architecture provides unmatched flexibility and elasticity, allowing cloud-based development teams to rapidly provision and scale storage resources as needed. SDS enables efficient resource utilization through features like thin provisioning and data deduplication, significantly reducing costs. The ability to create instant snapshots accelerates testing cycles, while automated tiering ensures optimal performance for different workloads. Moreover, SDS facilitates seamless integration with cloud platforms, supporting hybrid and multicloud strategies that many organizations are adopting for their development processes.
Hitachi Vantara's Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) One SDS is a powerful solution that uniquely addresses the needs of application development and testing teams. It provides enterprise-grade storage services with the flexibility and scalability needed for dynamic dev/test workloads. Key features include:
VSP One SDS empowers organizations to build a more agile, efficient and cost-effective infrastructure for their development and testing needs.
With its seamless integration with VSP One appliances, VSP One SDS helps create a unified data plane that spans on-premises and cloud environments. This integration enables replication from on-premises systems to the cloud, which is crucial for modern application development workflows. Application development and test teams can take a snapshot of production data and effortlessly replicate it to the cloud, providing an up-to-date dataset for testing and development purposes in a safe, isolated cloud environment.
VSP One SDS allows developers to take advantage of a unified data plane using common APIs, regardless of whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. This consistency in data access and management APIs streamlines development processes, reduces complexity and accelerates application delivery cycles. By bridging the gap between on-premises and cloud environments, VSP One SDS allows organizations to seamlessly use diverse resources, ensuring that application development teams have the elasticity of resources they need to innovate rapidly and confidently.
SDS offers several benefits for application development and testing environments. It's clear that the right SDS solution can significantly enhance your DevOps practices. But how does this translate into real-world applications? Hitachi VSP One SDS delivers these advantages and can help you transform your development processes.
Next Steps, Moving Forward with SDS
Evaluate how your IT or storage team supports DevOps today. Is your current storage infrastructure holding back your application development teams? If so, it might be time to consider how software-defined storage can evolve your development processes.
Here's what you can do:
Your storage solutions shouldn’t bottleneck your innovation. Embrace the power of software-defined storage to accelerate your application development cycles, reduce costs and stay ahead in today's fast-paced digital landscape.
Learn more about how VSP One SDS can optimize your development processes and drive your organization's success, as well as about common SDS use cases.
And be sure to check back soon for parts two and three in our series, covering distributed applications and cloud migration.
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Andy Gremett is Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Product Solutions Marketing, at Hitachi Vantara.
