provided by the storage giants. To increase the adaptability SDS need to more focused on the development of the solutions that incorporate and interoperate with the existing solutions. The SDS solution should contain the full spectrum of services that currently existing solutions are providing. The SDS solutions should not only be based on the commodity hardware but they should also be capable of running over the legacy storage solutions. The SDS solution should incorporate better solutions for data protection and data security. Finally SDS should grow gradually to achieve the acceptance and after standardization of all protocols it can fully replace the existing legacy solutions with a more open, cheaper, customizable, user oriented and reliable solutions that will be universally accepted and implemented. FUTURE DIRECTIONS Software-defined storage (SDS) helps in fulfilling needs of information customers, who are concern with optimizing infrastructure at lower cost and must meet the necessity requirements. Software defined storage summaries software functionalities from hardware, as various applications require precise storage characteristics like performance, security, cost and SO on. It also supports several physical or virtualized servers, additionally, virtualized all primary storage systems and networked systems to a common abstraction layer. SDS merges all types of storage systems into a single virtual scale-out storage offering unified automation, orchestration, provisioning, and management capabilities at the individual virtual machine (VM) level, while providing a central point of access to management functions. Downloaded: 4/15/2022 9:44:49 AM Nova Southeastern University IP Address: 137.52.76.29 Software-Defined Storage As a replacement of dedicated storage arrays, software defined storage enables industry standard hardware which reduces initial entry and repeated costs. Thus provides better performance and more simplified storage management. Unifying major storage services into a single automated plat