Unlike traditional approaches to storage, SDS was designed explicitly to support the diversity, virtualization and self-service that define the modern enterprise data center. Based on hyperscale (or webscale) approaches pioneered by Amazon, Facebook and Google, SDS allows an automated, agile and cost-effective infrastructure to keep pace with the exponential growth of data. Definitions of SDS vary from vendor to vendor, but Gartner Research captures its essence: “to abstract storage software from the underlying hardware, and to provide a common management platform and data services across an IT infrastructure composed of heterogeneous or homogeneous enterprise storage assets.”2 In other words, by de-coupling software from hardware, you can gain efficiencies on both fronts — for example, lowering costs by using industry-standard servers instead of higher-priced proprietary storage. This allows IT to do several important things: