VMware Cloud Providers™ offer a wide range of different service offerings to their customers, which themselves require a whole range of storage solutions. This extensive list of offerings is continuously being developed in order to differentiate providers from one another, to meet the ever-growing needs of modern applications, or to target specific industries and better serve their highly differentiated customer base. However, no matter what industries a service provider targets, whether computer gaming companies, financial institutions, or government customers, all sectors are seeing the same massive explosion in storage requirements, from both a capacity and a performance perspective.

The growth in data creation by human and automated systems that has been seen over the last decade has now reached an unprecedented rate. In addition, there are regulations and regulatory requirements that result in prolonged data retention. Because of this combination of factors, storage demands are exploding as never before, and putting significant pressure on service provider data centers, as shown in Figure 1.

 

Source: IDC, Yezhkova, Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Forecast, November 2013, #244293; http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=WC20140109 (by subscription).

 

For service providers to meet the increasing storage challenges faced by their consumers, future expectations for delivering and simplifying storage resources must be addressed. VMware Cloud Providers are uniquely positioned with their customers to help address the growing and pressing storage challenges, and management and provisioning of storage are two of the top issues, as shown in the following figure.

 

Source: IDC, Storage Predictions 2014, January 2014, General Storage QuickPoll, #243511, n=307.

 

The growing requirements and expectations of storage systems, and the improvements and simplifications that a software-defined storage (SDS) system can offer, have progressed from being important to service providers to being imperative, not only in the implementation of these new technologies but also in their selection. Centralized storage and a storage-area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) have proven to be an excellent example of storage efficiency in the past. However, with limited potential for further improvement, service providers are evaluating and moving to SDS solutions, which aim to provide significant improvements in efficiency in the following four key areas: