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IT pros have been juggling hardware and software decisions for years, struggling to find the right balance between the two. It's a simple equation that can be hard to resolve: The hardware should enhance the software it hosts, and the software should be able to take advantage of all the features the hardware offers. Ironically, storage vendors were the unlikely saviors, as they did the hardware-software tailoring to ensure both worked reasonably well together. But that service came at a price: dreaded vendor lock-in. The software ran great, the hardware hummed, but they only harmonized if you bought them from the same vendor. That was nothing new, however, and most IT veterans had gotten over their fear of getting locked into a specific vendor many moons ago. Vendor lock-in? Just a fact of IT life. Hardware-software tug of war continues So along come software-defined storage products and software-defined just about everything else. Software-defined storage (SDS) has been positioned as the remedy for those tightly linked ...