Software-Defined Storage FAQs

To learn more about software-defined storage, read our solution guide: A Comprehensive Guide to Enterprise Software-Defined Storage Technology

• What are the benefits of using software-defined storage over traditional storage solutions?
  • Key benefits of SDS include reduced hardware dependency, better resource utilization, and greater scalability. Implementing SDS generally results in lower costs, greater scalability, more flexibility, better performance, and simpler management.
• Why does software-defined storage reduce TCO?
  • It eliminates “vendor lock-in.” You can run SDS on commodity hardware rather than buying expensive, proprietary SAN hardware.
• How is SDS different from traditional storage systems?
  • In Traditional Storage, the software that manages your data is hardcoded into the proprietary hardware. You buy a box from a vendor and must use their specific drives and management tools. In SDS, the storage software is decoupled from the hardware. This means the “intelligence” lives in a software layer that can run on any industry-standard x86 server.
• Why does SDS scale better than traditional storage?
  • It uses a scale-out rather than a scale-up model. Instead of buying a massive, expensive controller head, you just keep adding standard servers to the cluster.
• How does software-defined storage ensure data security and reliability?
  • Several mechanisms make SDS a secure and reliable choice for modern storage needs, such as data encryption, replication, automated backups and snapshots, and access controls. SDS platforms typically offer automated failover mechanisms: if one node fails, another seamlessly takes over, minimizing downtime and ensuring data remains accessible and reliable. To learn more about software-defined storage for data security, read: How software-defined storage improves disaster recovery
• What is cloning in software-defined storage?
  • Cloning in SDS is the process of creating a fully functional, independent, and writable copy of a virtual volume or dataset at a specific point in time.
    • Thin Cloning: A “thin” clone is a space-efficient copy that initially shares data blocks with the source volume. It only consumes additional storage space when new data is written to it (using copy-on-write or redirect-on-write), making it fast and efficient.
    • Clone vs. Snapshot: While a snapshot is a point-in-time view of your data that can be used for backup, a clone is an independent, active volume. A clone can be created from a snapshot.
    • Persistent Clones: An independent, active volume that persists even if the source is deleted. [To learn more about Persistent Storage, read: Persistent Storage for Containers]
• Why does my SDS performance drop during a rebuild?
  • When a drive fails, the software must reconstruct the data across the remaining drives. This consumes CPU and network bandwidth, which can stall your applications. Lightbits Labs software defined storage solves this by leveraging NVMe/TCP and a clustered architecture. It can dynamically throttle rebuild traffic to ensure that “Front-end” application traffic always gets the IOPS it needs, effectively capping the rebuild’s impact on your latency.
• Why does SDS show less usable capacity than the total raw disk space?
  • Overhead. To keep your data safe, SDS uses replication (mirroring) or erasure coding, which consumes a significant amount of your raw storage space. Lightbits is often praised in the storage world for keeping “storage efficiency” from becoming a contradiction in terms. In many SDS environments, you lose 50% or more of your raw capacity to overhead, such as 3-way mirroring. Lightbits minimizes its impact through intelligent data placement and hardware-aware software engineering, giving you more usable TBs per rack than other SDS vendors.
• Can software-defined storage integrate with existing infrastructure and support cloud or hybrid environments?
  • SDS can easily integrate into existing IT environments and extend across cloud and hybrid architectures, offering flexibility, scalability, and centralized management. It is designed to run on commodity hardware without requiring specialized or proprietary devices and offers broad flexibility to support various workloads and storage architectures, including virtualized and containerized environments such as OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, and KVM.
• Why does software-defined storage (SDS) require a high-speed network?
  • SDS often aggregates disks across multiple servers. To make those disks act like one big pool, data has to travel between nodes at lightning speed to maintain consistent performance.
• Why does SDS use a controller VM?
  • Many SDS solutions, such as vSAN, run a virtual machine on each host to manage local storage and communicate with the rest of the cluster.
• Where to find reliable software-defined storage systems for research labs?
  • Finding reliable Software-Defined Storage (SDS) for a research lab involves balancing high-performance needs (like processing large datasets) with the flexibility to scale as grants and projects grow. See the table below for guidance.