Due to this very reason of traditional storage being hardware defined, cost plays a major role in making the decision. With traditional SAN & NAS storage array, you shell out a huge amount to procure and deploy the hardware, whereas, with SDS, you can simply start the storage cluster using commodity of the shelf hardware, it uses standard servers, drives and network. You don't any specialized hardware for deploying Distributed Data Storage . With Distributed Data Storage , you can minimize the cost of the infrastructure, which can be significant considering the continuous growth in demand of storage need. It combines storage and compute, hence, making full use of the servers. and consuming less power, cooling, space, etc.