With the rise of next-generation applications driven by trends like big data and the Internet of Things, organizations are turning to software-defined storage solutions to achieve greater agility, resilience, scalability and cost-efficiency. This approach to storage architecture uses a layer of software to provision, orchestrate and manage physical data storage capacity on industry-standard servers. By decoupling storage management software from hardware, software-defined solutions enable hardware and software to be acquired independently rather than locking organizations into proprietary platforms.