The concept behind software-defined storage seems very appealing: a single point of data services, like volume management and snapshots, form a single console while using practically anyone’s disk hardware.

As a pillar in the SDDC stack, Software Defined Storage (SDS) pools hardware storage resources and allows them to be programmatically defined in software. All the programming that controls storage-related tasks exists solely in software. The software could exist on a server or could be part of an operating system (OS) or a hypervisor. Provides flexible management at a much more granular level. Deployed Provision through S/W.

SDS forms a part of a broader software-defined data center (SDDC) concept wherein all the virtualized storage, server, networking and security resources required by an application can be defined by software and provisioned automatically. This design provides the means for storage services to be deployed on a wide range of hardware spanning vendor optimized to commodity to cloud.