Five lessons you learned as a child that apply to your enterprise storage strategy

By Bianca Owens, Red Hat Storage

Always share

Open, software-defined storage is only possible through the collaboration between hundreds, even thousands, of contributors worldwide who join forces to tackle some of the trickiest challenges around enterprise storage. Innovation isn’t limited to a small group of product managers and engineers but is instead a continuum of ideas from enthusiasts and practitioners, which is then hardened for enterprise consumption and backed by Red Hat’s world-class support.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

IT hardware has feelings, too. When your shiny new servers arrive in the datacenter, somewhere there is a tear shed by your trusty, and perhaps rusty, servers. Thanks to software-defined storage, they can now enjoy a new life as storage servers. Red Hat Storage software has smarts built into it to allow non-disruptive additions to the hardware cluster, allowing storage workloads to be deployed on newly added servers (or servers with newly added components) almost immediately.

Eat your veggies so you grow big and strong

Using a software-defined storage solution will help you scale easily as your storage needs evolve. Just as we all grow in steady, small increments, allowing for our bodies to adjust and balance as we gain height, Red Hat Storage enables administrators to scale with extremely granular control so they can build balanced storage systems that are not awkwardly skewed in favor of compute, network, memory, or capacity.

Don't be afraid to make new friends

By definition, software-defined storage is independent of the hardware on which it runs. This translates into greater flexibility and choice for customers who can use any industry-standard hardware and components. Red Hat Storage has many friends who make durable, cost-effective hardware and works closely with each of them to create reference architectures and product bundles to give customers a range of solutions along the build vs. buy spectrum. Read our lip: No vendor lock in.

Red Hat is also friends with public cloud providers. For instance, Red Hat Gluster Storage is available on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft public clouds. And what’s more interesting is that the same bits are deployed on premise, in containers and virtual machines, and public cloud deployments, which means fewer application rewrites and retooling as applications are transitioned across boundaries.

Money doesn't grow on trees

Customers and analysts agree that software-defined storage can significantly reduce storage costs. In a recent whitepaper on the economics of software-defined storage, IDC found that “over a five-year period, procuring server hardware with internal disks and deploying a software-based storage solution such as Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage can save businesses over 60% and 46%, respectively, compared with a competitive NAS solution.”

Comparable features and performance, at about half the price. What’s not to like? When it comes to storage, it’s never been better to be a kid in a candy store. Get started with your goody bag here.