What is Data Defined Storage?

Data defined storage is an approach to focus on metadata of the content. It makes the content easily identifiable, manageable and well organized. Data-defined storage is the plan for a new type of modular architectures which unlock the value of data as a business asset. At the same time, it enables the customers to enhance understanding of that data and heighten their awareness of compliance and realize cost savings through operational efficiencies. The data-centric approach of storage represents a major conceptual departure from the traditionally media-centric methodologies. Data defined storage brings the benefits of object storage and software-defined storage. Data defined storage has three pillars :

1. Media Independent Data Storage:
2. Data Security & Identity Management
3. Distributed Metadata Repository

Data-centric technologies employ the media independent storage services that includes object storage and deduplication technology that is replicated across multiple data centers (that is how IBM cloud storage works). This storage includes an object storage and file system layer which provides object storage with random access. They may use protocols related to multi-file system virtualization and can support all NAS and cloud protocols, including OpenStack, CIFS, NFS, and FTP. This protocol-agnostic approach is combined with data from virtualized storage pools. The end result is a unified view of the data. Several companies use GridBank’s open technology, including NEC, HP, EMC, Oracle (Sun), Nirvanix, Mezeo, and Amazon Web Services.

The continuous growth in data is pushing the enterprise to alter their storage strategies beyond traditional file storage and block-level storage. Object storage is rapidly gaining attention within the organizations which generate huge amounts of unstructured data and archive that data. From our provided information, it will be obvious that data defined storage is a variation to object storage.

The main reason to think behind data-defined storage is organizing large amounts of unstructured data. Data-defined storage indexes data and metadata to turn raw data into useful information. Business value being derived from this data.