2021-2022 Top 5 Rising Vendors of SDS Block Storage Solutions

This report, published on February 16, 2021, was written by by Todd Dorsey, analyst, DCIG LLC.

2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors SDS Block Storage Solutions Report Now Available

Background: SDS – Factors Driving Adoption
The growth of SDS is part of a broader transition to the software-defined data center, where infrastructure elements such as compute, storage, and networking are abstracted and virtualized.

Increasing SDS capabilities, along with the demand for flexibility and agility, fuels SDS demand. Trending at a compound growth rate of 27%, the SDS market expects to grow $42.79 billion by 2024.

Factors contributing to growth of SDS include:
• Agility and optionality. Organizations can deploy and configure SDS solutions where and how they want using their preferred server provider, which may differ from their preferred storage software vendor. Expanded deployment options open up within virtual and cloud platforms as SDS solutions free them from particular hardware vendors and infrastructures.
• Increasingly powerful hardware. Advances in underlying system hardware, including multicore CPUs, large amounts of RAM, flash memory, and fast networking, contribute to SDS growth. In many cases, these advances eliminate the need for specialized storage hardware, enabling ever-expanding storage capacity and consistent, low-latency performance.
• Hybrid cloud environments. Cloud adoption and in particular, the embrace of hybrid cloud models stimulates expansion of SDS. Storage vendors now offer their solutions as software on servers of the customer’s choice and on public cloud platforms. They provide enterprise data services with performance characteristics businesses need for confidence to move their workloads to these platforms.

SDS for Block Storage
The traditional SAN appliance has long been the trusted, shared platform for an enterprise’s most valuable data. As SDS has moved mainstream, many enterprise storage vendors have made their solutions available as SDS on-premises and in the cloud. Enterprises are comfortable extending trust to these SDS solutions for mission-critical workloads. In many cases, SDS solutions for hybrid cloud environments become a natural extension of the on-premise SAN. With these solutions, the tools and scripts to deploy and manage cloud data are the same as on-premise data management.

Rising Vendors SDS Block Storage Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated 14 SDS solutions supporting block storage protocols.

The general categories under which these features fell included:
• Deployment capabilities
• Data protection
• Product and performance management
• Documentation
• Technical support
• Licensing and pricing

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following rising vendors SDS block storage solutions a Top 5 ranking: