The Effect of Accelerating the Growth of Data
We live in a world in which the unlimited collection and storage of data is leading to significant and ever-increasing storage needs. The ensuing challenges for companies are immense, and include:
- The uncontrolled growth of data – especially unstructured data (audio, video, sensor-based data, Internet of Things) – which has led to difficulties with the classification, replication and long-term storage of data, in spite of research that shows that 80% of data is no longer accessed after 45 days);
- Questions about how to take advantage of the value of this data, in order to extract business intelligence and improve corporations, along with their products, services, efficiency, etc.;
- The need to make existing data accessible to anyone, at any time or in any place, and on all platforms.
Over the coming years, we foresee major changes in business data storage practices, which will include 4 main technological innovations for which new standards are now being set:
- Le Software-Defined Storage (e.g., VMware vVOL) – to bolster and centralize storage management using a layer of shared, independent software that will help manage data using “storage policies”;
- All-Flash technologies – to address the ever-growing need for performance and to help eliminate manual third-party data management;
- Object Storage – to manage and protect businesses’ unstructured data and file environments and to enable the classification, life cycle management and administration of data, while offering greater mobility to access data and apply business intelligence via metadata analysis;
- Cloud Storage – to offer businesses the option of hiring external providers to store, replicate and save data on a cloud environment, as part of a philosophy to extend the storage policies set by the company via these potential external partners.
Why should businesses look into object storage immediately?
- To reduce their storage costs
- To unclog their current primary storage systems to gain space and bolster performance
- To establish an effective approach to managing inactive data and files
- To completely rethink their approach to archiving and recovering data by integrating the potential of a cloud environment
Object storage allows each piece of information or data to be processed as a distinct object, along with the advantage of analyzing content and applying associated policies. Processing metadata (or data about data) helps establish a system of auto-classification, management, auto-optimization and protection of data based on policies, which follow the data as it moves through your IT infrastructure or cloud platform.
To date, the main ways in which object storage has been used include:
- Managing and archiving file environments (Object, NAS);
- Saving (or auto-protecting) data, in which object storage becomes the target for saving or replicating, thereby helping to eliminate cartridges and other physical supports;
- Managing dense objects, such as videos (surveillance cameras, etc.), audio files (call centres, etc.), ultra-high-definition images (medical imaging, engineering, etc.);
- Data processing (data mining, business intelligence, big data, etc.), which groups together business intelligence and the capacity to analyze metadata.
Educative YouTube Videos
Pierre Raymond, Storage Solutions Architect at PCD, explains to us in this interview how object storage is largely set to replace traditional network attached storage (NAS) and archiving architectures.
Video of the Interview
Part 1
Click here to watch the video (French only)
Part 2
Click here to watch the video (French only)
Conclusion
Object storage offers businesses the richest gamut of features, allowing them to store, organize, protect, analyze and understand their unstructured data environments. It is actively used by several large cloud service suppliers, including Amazon, Google, IBM, Facebook and NetFlix, and is poised to soon become the market standard for businesses. Several Quebec businesses are just now discovering the potential that this technology can afford when combined with the other storage-based solutions and innovations discussed in this article.
For More Information
We invite you to learn more about object storage. Please feel free to contact us or send your questions to our specialists.
M. Pierre Raymond,
Solutions Architect, Storage and Information Management
PCD Solutions
Courriel : praymond@pcdsolutions.com