Software-Defined Storage — Opportunities for the Enterprise

IDC believes that software-defined storage (SDS) continues to transform IT deployment and consumption of storage resources. For enterprises, SDS is really an on-ramp to deploying a hybrid cloud — one that allows a metered on-demand consumption of private and public cloud resources. Deploying SDS therefore is not a question of "if" but a question of "when." IDC's August 2015 Software-Defined Infrastructure Survey found that 75% of enterprises have deployed or are considering deploying some form of SDS in their environment.

For such enterprises, the question of "why" is adequately clarified. In fact, IDC found that 61% of enterprises that deployed SDS have realized tangible benefits such as reduction in capex/opex costs, ease of management, reduction in provisioning time, and peace of mind knowing that they are no longer locked into a single vendor solution. IDC believes that SDS is compelling enterprises to switch from a pattern of selecting systems based on their capacity, performance, reliability, and cost characteristics to a service-focused decoupled acquisition model in which hardware and software are acquired independent of each other. Furthermore, the software in question (i.e., SDS) is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. In fact, for enterprises and vendors to succeed with SDS, they have to take a use case–driven approach.