Other attributes
A form of composable disaggregated infrastructure, disaggregated storage allows resources to be connected via a network fabric providing flexibility when upgrading, replacing, or adding individual resources. It also allows servers to be built for future growth, offering greater storage efficiency, scale and performance than traditional data storage without compromising throughput and latency.
Background
Direct-attached storage – disks or drives attached to a single server. Disk capacity and performance were available to that server, and only that server. Capacity expansion was limited to the number of drive bays in the server or the limits of expansion chassis. Capacity and performance can scale-up (adding drives to a server) or out (by adding servers).
Storage area networks – disks or drives in a storage array which could be provisioned to one or many servers on the network. Capacity expansion is limited to the number of supported expansion chassis.
Direct-attached storage has one critical advantage—it offers high-performance for any workloads running on that server. However, it comes with two critical disadvantages: Overall performance across the network is low, as storage can't be shared over the network without performance impact. Capacity utilization is low because disk capacity can't be directly used by other servers.
Storage area networks are used to allocate storage to dozens or possibly hundreds of servers, which increases capacity utilization, but storage area networks use specialized network hardware and/or protocols that can come with disadvantages. Conventional storage networking does not provide sufficient throughput or latency minimization needed by many applications, and fails to provide enough bandwidth to utilize the full performance of new flash technologies.
