Which Question’s More Important to Your Business: How to Best Use Data, or Where It’s Stored?
The explosion in data – driven by new technologies like AI, ML and VR, and by a growing appreciation of the value of data in general – is not the result of the public’s swelling affection for storage technology. It stems from the realization of how data, properly applied, can reveal insights, make operations more efficient, and put more money on the bottom line.
The question of how best to use data is the one your business needs to spend time answering.
But if you’re a CIO – or a CFO – you need answers to the technical issues of storage to enable the rest of your business to answer the use questions. The money’s there to find solutions, according to a recent article by IDC; they say new technologies will drive information and communication technology (ICT) spending back to double the rate of GDP growth. The new technologies IDC mentions are AI, VR and ML and IoT.
Customers starting IoT or research projects gather the same amount of data in a month that they did over the previous 25 years. If you’re managing this data for your organization, how disruptive will it be for your current storage environment to add 70-80 TB per month?
Are you planning to store this data in your own facilities, someone else’s facilities, or are you sending it “to the cloud?” Or do local compliance rules and regulations stop you from doing that with at least some of your data? As long as the major cloud providers have not solved the compliance and “where is my data” issues, you will probably need to store at least some specific data locally, behind your own firewall, or work with a trusted local service provider.
Issues like this push the decision back toward “how will we manage our data?” and away from “what can we do with our data?” To keep the emphasis where it needs to be, you need object storage.
The nice thing about object storage, compared to traditional file storage, is that a lot of common sense is already built in. Object storage is extremely scalable. You can start small with 50 TB on 3 nodes and can scale out to hundreds of PB on hundreds of notes in multiple data centers (and clouds).
Object storage employs a “shared nothing” cluster architecture, which means that all parts of the system work in parallel. Data throughput grows continuously as the system expands. Just by adding additional nodes, capacity and performance increase.
Since object storage is designed with redundancy built in, the data is protected without requiring a separate backup process. With Cloudian, you can select the level of data protection needed for each data type to optimize efficiency. Systems can be configured to tolerate multiple node failures, or even the loss of an entire data center.
And you can add information (metadata) about the data. Not just the file name, but information about the content, the research, the author, the date, the people involved, the color, the smell – whatever information is important to your organization’s decision process.
It also allows you to manage where specific data is stored, allowing you to cope with local data management regulations while at the same time benefitting from a limitlessly scalable solution. Object storage allows you to comply with regulations locally while scaling storage globally.
Object storage answers all the “how” questions gracefully, with a lower management overhead and the ability to scale at the pace of your business. By answering those questions effectively – now and for the future – object storage allows your business to re-focus on the right question: how to use data most effectively achieve its objectives.
To learn more about object storage – and why users are choosing Cloudian to provide it – read the Top 10 Reasons Customers Choose Cloudian HyperStore.
