Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/809568
22 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com a nd it's just the tip of the iceberg: soware- defined storage (SDS) and now Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) are also increasing the rate of change. With these changes comes a new set of requirements and responsi- bilities for the storage administrator. More aBout flaSh, SdS and nvMe With many times the perfor- mance of current HDD technology and less time needed to provision and optimize systems, flash stor- age certainly took the data center by storm. It has also influenced the application landscape by removing the performance bottleneck and associ- ated latencies, enhancing the overall user experience for modern applica- tions. Looking to the future, the recent convergence of cloud computing and flash storage has led to new hybrid IT storage solutions that enable a next- generation, high-performance and high-efficiency data center. Similarly, the NVMe interface is designed to exploit the low latency and internal parallelism of flash- based storage devices, mirroring the parallelism in modern CPUs and applications. Flash and NVMe are complementary technologies and can be considered the foundation of modern infrastructure services. e real winners of the race to fine-tune and perfect storage performance will be application developers and the consumers of memory-hungry applications. Despite the rapid adoption of flash storage and growing attention on NVMe, we'd be remiss to exclude SDS from the discussion, as it's caus- ing substantial changes to data center management as well. But rather than the speeds and feeds end goal of flash and NVMe, SDS instead focuses on policy-driven, automated provisioning and management of data storage. An extension of virtualization constructs, it creates an abstraction of storage resources to form resource pools across different implementations. Ultimately, SDS enables organizations to work with more-commodity-based hardware; as long as the SDS deploy- ment is sitting on supported storage hardware, there is essentially no dif- ference between an organization using flash arrays and an organization using NVMe. a douBle-edged Sword Of course, these advancements in storage technology have proven to be a bit of a double-edged sword. Remov- ing storage latency and bottlenecks has introduced capacity problems: with storage arrays now able to handle a larger workload while maintain- ing low latencies across application I/O requests, more applications and data are subsequently added to those arrays. All of these changes mean storage space becomes an issue sooner rather than later. A comprehensive storage- monitoring tool that tracks historical usage and performance metrics, as well as enables proper capacity plan- ning and resource allocation, can help ameliorate this problem. At the same time, a soware-defined environment allows engineers to provision storage resources as part of their automation and orchestration workflow. Although doing so helps ensure methodi- cal management of these resources, it poses a threat to the traditional middleman, so to speak: the storage administrator. SDS will remove the need for a storage administrator with specific op- erational knowledge about a specific storage vendor. At the same time, the enhancements delivered by flash and NVMe mean storage administrators no longer need to calculate and manu- ally distribute workloads because of performance concerns. ere is a tremendous rate and scale of change in modern IT in- frastructure across the board, and just as with their similarly siloed colleagues—network administra- tors, systems administrators, virtual administrators and database adminis- trators—storage administrators must be careful not to niche themselves out of the data center. Storage technology was once the go-to scapegoat for data center performance hiccups, and it was often considered the most conservative element of IT infrastructure. It has evolved in the last several years, however. Although hard- disk drive (HDD) storage will likely remain a data center staple owing to its relatively low costs and the need to support legacy applications, flash technology has turned the storage landscape on its head.