Dell S4148U-ON EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition Storage Overview - Page 8

3.4 3.5 content, SAN arrays account for most of the money that is spent on external disk storage worldwide. SAN connectivity options were traditionally based around Fibre Channel, but in recent years the broader adoption of 10 GbE has firmly planted iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) as a mainstream choice. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is another option that has had slow adoption in the market. Virtualization has driven SAN growth in the last 15 years. With the ability to use compute resources effectively, virtualization provides the abstraction layer between hardware and workloads providing workload mobility. Moving applications across physical hosts for maintenance, workload balancing, or disaster recovery requires shared storage. Object storage Object storage is a technology that creates extra abstraction, often on top of and across local file systems. This means that the data in the system is managed as objects, instead of blocks or files. The objects include the data, a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level, or object-storage device, the system level, and the interface level. This namespace can span hundreds of servers, enabling easier scaling of capacity than either SAN or NAS models. Software-defined storage Software-defined storage (SDS) is part virtualization software and part storage management software. SDS abstracts the bits of data that is included with hardware, formats the data into an object, block, or file format, and organizes the data for network use. SDS works well with unstructured data workloads such as the object and block storage systems that containers and microservices rely upon since it can scale in ways that nonvirtualized storage solutions cannot. 8 Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition Storage Overview