IT leaders discuss benefits of software-defined storage

'If you take storage for granted you're missing a trick,' says Matt Cadieux, CIO of Red Bull Racing

A panel of IT leaders discussed the benefits of software-defined storage at a recent Computing IT Leaders Forum event 'Building an insight driven digital business'.

Matt Cadieux, CIO at Red Bull Racing, said that if CIOs take storage for granted, they're missing a trick, and failing to solve a business problem which needs to be solved.

Cadieux described his environment, which uses IBM's Spectrum Scale product for its file and object storage.

"We added capacity in our software control layer," said Cadieux. "This control layer allows us to make changes which are invisible to the company, but it means that the performance and capacity they need is there whenever they require," he added.

Cadieux was describing his software-defined approach, where the control layer he discussed is abstracted out and kept independent of the physical infrastructure.

By contrast, Alun Jones, data scientist at Konecranes explained that his set up is very different.

"Everything we have is siloed," said Jones. "We have Microsoft, Oracle, and other kit, some on premise, some off, and some in the cloud. It's really hard too get that single layer view of everything we've got. Similarly it would be very hard to Join my SQL data up to my Oracle data. Ideally I would like to change it, but that's not an easy task given the bureaucracy of a large company."

"Bringing it all together is a hard job," agreed Kevin Findlay, digital IT director at insurer Complete Cover Group. "There are always new systems to bring together, and we do see an opportunity for improvement there."

Earlier in the conversation, Findlay had argued that storage is still waiting for its ‘Apple moment', suggesting that the area is ripe for disruption.