Today’s business climate carries a great deal of uncertainty for companies of all sizes and industries. To seize new business models and opportunities, systems must be flexible and easily adjusted in order to respond to growth spurts, seasonality and peak periods. Likewise, agility helps us mitigate risk .With the sluggish economies across the world, there is a need to be prepared to react quickly to changing fortunes. From cutting back when needed to rapidly growing when opportunities present themselves, companies are less focused on long-term planning in favor of quick decisions and meeting quarterly expectations.

Technology is changing business dynamics as well. Social, mobile and cloud are impacting companies’ operations, meaning they need to be able to meet changing demand 24x7. This has put a premium on companies’ ability to react quickly while being able to absorb and analyze all the data they are gathering.
In survey after survey, CxOs highlight the following challenges when it comes to IT:

• Dealing with the rapid growth of data
• High cost of storing this data
• Delivering high-performance applications
• Meeting Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery requirements

When looking at IT infrastructure, it’s pretty clear that compute and networking have taken the lead in meeting these demanding requirements. But, storage is a laggard. Enter Software-defined Storage (SDS). Aside from being the latest buzzword, what is SDS and will it help companies like yours succeed? Put simply, SDS delivers agility, faster time to respond to change and more purchasing power control in terms of cost decisions. Gartner defines SDS as “storage software on industry-standard server hardware [to] significantly lower opex of storage upgrades and maintenance costs… Eliminates need for high-priced proprietary storage hardware”.

Our own research based on thousands of customers’ real-world feedback shows a growing interest in SDS. By separating the storage software from storage hardware, SDS is able to:

• Pool data stores allowing all storage assets and their existing and new capacity investments to work together ;enabling different storage devices from different vendors to be managed in common
• Provide a comprehensive set of data services across different platforms and hardware
• Separate advances in software from advances in hardware
• Automate and simplify management of all storage

The benefits to your company are potentially enormous. In a recent survey of over 2000 DataCore customers that have deployed SDS, key findings include:

• 79% improved performance by 3X or more
• 83% reduced storage-related downtime by 50% or more
• 81% reduced storage-related spending by 25% or more
• 100% saw a positive ROI in the first year

It’s these kind of results and the advances in performance and efficiency due to DataCore’s revolutionary Parallel I/O technology within our SDS solution that have led to over 30k customer deployments globally and 96% of CxOs surveyed stating they recommend DataCore SDS.