Software-Defined is certainly all the rage in marketing circles lately. It’s tough to pin down a specific definition if you look across vendors, industry influencers, and customers. Wikipedia (source of all knowledge) may have it best when they call software-defined storage “a marketing theme that lacks consensus.” 

Picking up the conversation started by my colleague Kate Davis. Kate writes:

In the last blog, we posed the question: How do you defined software-defined storage? We offered up a base definition of what software-defined storage means to us. Since then, IDC has released a new taxonomy on software-defined storage which includes its definition:

The promise of cloud computing is to reduce the cost of IT infrastructure assets and processes through lower operational expenses stemming from the cloud’s ability to allow organizations to purchase only the resources that are needed, when they need it. Large enterprise software applications are faced with stringent requirements related to performance, delay, and service uptimes.