Software-defined infrastructure has become an increasingly common alternative to traditional storage systems that require IT staff with special skills to deploy, operate, and maintain. SAN and NAS systems designed for dedicated storage hardware and, in some cases, special high-speed networking gear have historically been the preferred choice for important performance-sensitive enterprise workloads. However, flash drives and nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) technologies now facilitate high performance with software-defined storage running on general-purpose server hardware, potentially at a lower cost than legacy systems. Software-defined infrastructure can also ease the scaling of storage capacity and increase data input/output (I/O) and throughput through the addition of nodes, making the systems well suited to modern business intelligence workloads that can grow at an unpredictable rate.
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