Pure Storage’s recent launch of its Enterprise Data Cloud reignited debate around storage and data management.
Pure claims its EDC addresses the management of growing volumes of data in a complex regulatory environment, and the demands storage faces from artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
The idea of a single management layer for storage is not new. Pure is not the only supplier looking to automate storage provision and management, where storage comes in “fleets”, and data management and governance take place across local, cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
But while analysts agree Pure has a technical edge for now, most suppliers offer tools that work across on-premise and cloud technologies with the aim of reducing storage management overheads through automation and AI.
Analyst GigaOm, for example, rates Pure Storage as a leader in data pipeline support, especially for demanding AI deployments, alongside Hitachi Vantara, HPE, IBM, NetApp and Dell Technologies.
“Adopting high-performance storage optimised for AI workloads is a strategic business imperative, not merely a technical upgrade,” says Whit Walters, field chief technology officer at GigaOm.
From storage to data management
AI’s demands for vast amounts of data has pushed chief information officers (CIOs) and suppliers to look beyond technical infrastructure management of storage, and to a wider concept of data management.
This includes managing conventional metrics, such as capacity, performance and availability, and routine tasks such as provisioning and backup, to issues such as data location for compliance and ransomware protection.
At a basic level, CIOs need to control all of a supplier’s products from a single control plane, from on-premise to the cloud. This includes day-to-day tasks like provisioning, data migration and upgrades, as well as robust monitoring. Ideally, data management should integrate with the supplier’s as-a-service tools, too.
But all this becomes harder as data volumes and performance requirements increase.
“There is a growing challenge with managing enterprise infrastructure at scale,” explains Simon Robinson, principal analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “This is not a new problem. Infrastructure and operations teams spend too much time instrumenting, fine tuning, provisioning and managing capacity for their enterprise workload. Storage is still pretty onerous in that respect.”
Improvements in storage management, he says, have mostly been technical, such as thin provisioning, and at the array level. This makes it harder to scale systems, and fails to account for integration with the cloud.
“Now the control plane needs to extend across the on-premise environment and the public cloud,” says Robinson. “That is a really difficult problem to solve.”
Meanwhile, data and storage management tools rarely work across rival supplier platforms. Even though platform-neutral storage management has been tried, suppliers reverted to their own tools, with extensions into cloud environments.
The argument is that single supplier tools offer a performance advantage that outweighs the drawbacks.
“Going back 10 years, the goal was to consistently manage a heterogeneous vendor environment,” says Robinson. “That hasn’t materialised. The trade off with all of these approaches is that you are going to get the best results if you standardise around a particular vendor’s systems.”
Some supplier offerings, such as IBM Storage Virtualize, provide multi-supplier support. But most, such as Pure’s EDC, assume IT leaders will trade compatibility for performance.
Here, we list some key data management features of the main data storage suppliers.
Dell Technologies
Dell’s PowerScale technology provides a scale-out architecture, supporting management of local and cloud storage from the same interface.
Dell includes data management for AI and unstructured data, through DataIQ (for unstructured data) and CloudIQ (for cloud).
DataIQ works across Dell EMC PowerScale and Isilon hardware, as well as S3 compatible cloud storage. Though Apex, Dell also provides a platform for multi-cloud management, although it is not specific to storage.
HPE
HPE says its Alletra Storage product gives a “cloud experience” for workloads locally or in the cloud. Its Greenlake platform provides as-a-service storage across on-premise, hybrid and cloud.
Zerto offers data protection across hybrid environments. Alongside this, HPE’s Data Management Framework 7 provides data management tools across high-performance and AI storage, including tiering and automated file movement.
Huawei
Huawei’s data management engine (DME) provides provisioning, lifecycle management, alerting and anomaly detection. It also supports multi-cloud operations, and uses AI to predict system risks, through DME IQ.
DME supports Huawei’s own arrays and its FusionStorage, as well as some support for third-party hardware and hosts such as ESXi.
IBM
IBM has a wide range of storage and data management capabilities, split across a range of tools. Storage Virtualize is a long-established tool able to manage hardware in multi-supplier environments.
IBM Storage Insights Pro is subscription-based, and provides inventory, capacity and performance management for IBM and non-IBM block storage.
IBM Storage Scale provides high-performance data management, while IBM Spectrum Control delivers monitoring and analytics across multiple suppliers on-premise and in the cloud.
NetApp
NetApp has a range of storage and data management capabilities, including through its Ontap storage operating system, its StorageGrid multi-cloud technology and its Keystone as-a-service offering.
Keystone can control storage across on-premise and the cloud, and includes governance, compliance and ransomware protection, as well as deployment and management tools. BlueXP allows users to control storage and data services across local and cloud systems.
Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara’s VSP One offers a single data plane to integrate data and simplify management across on-premise and cloud. It supports block, file and object, as well as software-defined storage (SDS) and, unusually, support for mainframes.
VSP One SDS can run on third-party hardware, as well as on Amazon’s cloud. VSP 360 provides cloud orchestration as well as fleet management; Everflex provides storage-as-a-service.
Pure Storage
Enterprise Data Cloud allows customers to manage data across a “storage cloud”, regardless of the location of physical storage. This allows customers to focus on managing data, it says.
It also allows any Pure array to work as an endpoint for the fleet. EDC is made up of Pure’s hardware layer, its cloud-based Pure1 storage management and optimisation platform, and its Pure Fusion control plane for fleet management.
