Last year, Gartner research revealed that SDS solutions “can reduce TCO by 50% or more without sacrificing performance, data services software robustness, or availability service-level objectives” compared with branded integrated legacy external controllerbased (ECB) storage offerings.1 Fifty percent! Further, “when deployed as the storage element of a hyper-converged integrated system reference architecture, cost savings can approach 70% compared with a traditional three-tier storage-area-network-based legacy ECB storage infrastructure.” In regard to a strategic planning, the analysis shows that “by 2019, 50% of existing storage array products will also be available as software-only versions…[and] by 2020, 70% of storage provisioning and management functions will be integrated into the infrastructure platform,” up from 10% just last year.2 Software really is eating the world, and while storage comes with unique considerations, it is not exempt. SDS as a concept — policy-based data storage provisioning and management independent of underlying hardware — is driven not only by enterprises’ eternal need to reduce costs, but also by the desire to enable the wide range of emerging capabilities like distributed, scale-out storage for easy growth and automatic redundancy and replication for data protection, as well as the natural repulsion toward vendor lock-in.