Software Defined Storage (SDS) is a storage architecture that separates storage intelligence and management from the physical hardware. It unifies various resources—disks, servers, and cloud block devices—into a single, virtualized, software-controlled storage pool. This enables automated, policy-driven management of data services such as provisioning, replication, tiering, and snapshots, to be consistently applied across diverse devices and locations, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Paragraph locked by Anonymous user

SDS is characterized by three key components:

• Hardware abstraction: Storage resources from commodity servers, JBODs, or cloud block devices are abstracted into a single logical pool.
• Policy-driven services: Provisioning, replication, tiering, snapshots, deduplication, and QoS are controlled by software policies rather than fixed hardware features.
• Automation & integration: APIs and orchestration integrate SDS with cloud-native platforms, containers, and management/backup ecosystems.

SDS reduces vendor lock-in, lowers cost by using commodity or Arm-based hardware (e.g., Ampere Altra), and makes storage more agile and scalable for mixed workloads including VMs and databases to containerized applications. Practically, SDS enables predictable operations and efficiency, while retaining centralized data services and automation.

• Ampere - Ampere Altra product info
• SNIA - Software-Defined Storage overview
• CNCF - Storage in cloud-native environments
• Ampere Resources & Solutions