Storage hypervisor

Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup. Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup. Software-defined storage (SDS) hardware may or may not also have abstraction, pooling, or automation software of its own. When implemented as software only in conjunction with commodity servers with internal disks, it may suggest software such as a virtual or global file system. If it is software layered over sophisticated large storage arrays, it suggests software such as storage virtualization or storage resource management, categories of products that address separate and different problems. If the policy and management functions also include a form of artificial intelligence to automate protection and recovery, it can be considered as intelligent abstraction. Software-defined storage may be implemented via appliances over a traditional storage area network (SAN), or implemented as network-attached storage (NAS), or using object-based storage. In March 2014 the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) began a report on software-defined storage. VMware used the marketing term 'software-defined data center' (SDDC) for a broader concept wherein all the virtual storage, server, networking and security resources required by an application can be defined by software and provisioned automatically.Other smaller companies then adopted the term 'software-defined storage', such as Coraid (now owned by Coraid founder's new company SouthSuite), Scality (founded in 2009), Cleversafe (acquired by IBM), and OpenIO. Based on similar concepts as software-defined networking (SDN),interest in SDS rose after VMware acquired Nicira for over a billion dollars in 2012. Data storage vendors used various definitions for software-defined storage depending on their product-line. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a standards group, attempted a multi-vendor, negotiated definition with examples. Characteristics of software-defined storage may include the following features: In computing, a storage hypervisor is a software program which can run on a physical server hardware platform, on a virtual machine, inside a hypervisor OS or in the storage network. It may co-reside with virtual machine supervisors or have exclusive control of its platform. Similar to virtual server hypervisors a storage hypervisor may run on a specific hardware platform, a specific hardware architecture, or be hardware independent. The storage hypervisor software virtualizes the individual storage resources it controls and creates one or more flexible pools of storage capacity. In this way it separates the direct link between physical and logical resources in parallel to virtual server hypervisors. By moving storage management into isolated layer it also helps to increase system uptime and High Availability. 'Similarly, a storage hypervisor can be used to manage virtualized storage resources to increase utilization rates of disk while maintaining high reliability.' The storage hypervisor, a centrally-managed supervisory software program, provides a comprehensive set of storage control and monitoring functions that operate as a transparent virtual layer across consolidated disk pools to improve their availability, speed and utilization.