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There is a very fundamental difference between the IT infrastructure of large public cloud providers and that of traditional enterprise data centres. Common to both are racks and racks of standard servers. The most conspicuous infrastructure component that is missing from cloud providers’ IT is the traditional storage array, whether it is a SAN or NAS. Public cloud providers need to keep their capital and operational costs in check to remain profitable and competitive.

Initially, all data centres including service providers leveraged storage arrays, since it was the only technology available to meet reliability, availability, scalability and storage performance needs. However, it became clear for public cloud providers that storage costs were running out of control due to the exponential increase in storage demands. To address this, they eliminated storage arrays by leveraging industry standard servers and commodity components and delivering storage data services in software.

Convergence of compute and storage has also simplified storage management tasks and it has delivered the performance that applications demand. Operational savings are achieved by eliminating routine management tasks and automating as many tasks as possible.

Historically, enterprise data centres have used storage arrays to leverage the benefits of server virtualisation including agility, dynamic load balancing, high availability and disaster recovery. The pressing question for our time though is this: can enterprises mimic the public cloud deployment model for storage described here, and in so doing eliminate storage arrays from the virtual data centre?

The answer to this question is a resounding yes. New technologies are entering the market that can help enterprise data centres to eliminate the cost and complexity of storage arrays.

To eliminate storage arrays and their associated challenges, this new storage infrastructure should be implemented in software running alongside the hypervisor and leveraging the resources available in servers. This storage software should meet and exceed the services provided by storage arrays. First and foremost, it should deliver the capabilities of shared storage by aggregating server-side storage resources from multiple servers and assimilating a global namespace. There can be no compromise on enterprise-class features such as data availability and integrity, resiliency, snapshots and clones, or replication and capacity optimisation features such as thin provisioning, compression and deduplication.

Second, the storage solution should deliver the performance and scalability requirements of mission-critical applications. This approach also enables independent and linear scalability of both compute and storage. Providing all of these data services in a software layer on a converged compute and storage platform alongside the hypervisor, leveraging industry standard servers, delivers significant cost savings.

Eliminating storage arrays removes the need for deep storage and vendor specific expertise. Managing storage is as simple as managing CPU and memory in a virtual infrastructure. This allows customers to manage storage only when there is an exception, such as a drive failure. Eliminating storage constructs such as LUNs, volumes, file systems and aligning storage with the virtual machine construct eliminates storage management tasks. Additionally, delivering all data services at VM-level granularity and providing a single-pane-of-glass for managing the infrastructure dramatically simplifies and streamlines IT, in turn maximising operational savings.

Eliminating storage arrays also removes the need for associated storage networking, eliminating the need for additional switches and HBAs which delivers considerable cost savings. Converging compute and storage on standard servers eliminates storage networking tasks such as zoning, LUN masking and more.

We are at the beginning of a new era in enterprise storage, which enables enterprise data centres to eliminate storage arrays. In fact enterprise data centres can deliver a more robust internal private cloud and secure the benefits associated with public cloud offerings to deliver IT as a service.