DCIG Researching Unified and Universal SDS Solutions

This report, published on March 17, 2022, was written by Todd Dorsey, analyst at DCIG, LLC.

DCIG Researching Unified and Universal SDS Solutions

DCIG is expanding its SDS research to include unified and universal storage solutions. It invites solution providers to participate in the survey research taking place through April 6, 2022. It will publish results beginning in the 2nd quarter. These DCIG Top 5 reports help IT decision-makers save valuable time through a succinct analysis of available solutions.

SDS background
A growing number of businesses are adopting SDS. SDS decouples storage software from its hardware. Businesses value SDS software for the flexibility SDS gives them to use the hardware of their choosing, and even deploy the same storage solution on-premises and in the public cloud.

SDS research: block, file, object, unified and universal storage
DCIG performed a scan of the SDS marketplace and discovered dozens of SDS providers. It focused its initial research on SDS block, file, and object storage solutions. Now it is expanding its SDS research to include unified and universal storage solutions.

It defines unified storage solutions by their support for both block and file storage protocols. Universal storage supports block, file and S3 protocol access to the data. In a sense, universal storage is the next evolution of unified storage through the addition of object storage protocol support to the traditional block and file protocol support. Universal storage also delivers the performance, data services, and key integrations organizations expect from primary storage solutions.

Preliminary list of unified and universal SDS solutions for evaluation
Based on a preliminary scan of the marketplace, the analyst identified the following solutions to be evaluated for possible inclusion in the unified or universal storage SDS research.
• Buurst SoftNAS
• Commvault Distributed Storage
• DataCore SANSymphony
• Dell EMC UnityVSA
• Open-E JovianDSS
• iXsystems TrueNAS SCALE
• LINBIT LINBIT SDS
• NetApp ONTAP Select
• Nexustorage Nexfs
• Nutanix Unified Storage
• OSNEXUS QuantaStor
• Red Hat Ceph Storage
• StarWind VSAN
• StoneFly StoneFusion
• Storidge CIO
• StorONE S1 Enterprise Storage Platform
• Tintri NexentaStor
• Veritas InfoScale
• VMware vSAN
• Zadara VPSA Storage Array