If you're at the early stages of evaluating a storage refresh, it’s likely not your favorite project, but it holds significant weight for the future of your organization. Enterprise storage systems aren't refreshed often, and that’s understandable. However, if it’s been a few years since your last upgrade, you're likely facing a very different technology environment.
The driver that wins the big race does not get as much credit for the win if he simply drove the fastest car on the track. After all, logic says the driver should win. A recent trend in data storage has been to migrate to all flash array storage solutions. Flash drives are certainly faster than HDD disks. For those enterprises that implement AFA storage arrays, performance is definitely fast, which it should be using the logic of the fastest racecar. However, there are companies that are achieving ultrafast performance without having to pay the premium price for high performance storage media. Now that is real innovation.
By now you’ve heard about VMware vSAN, a software defined storage (SDS) solution that combines direct storage devices across a vSphere cluster to create a shared data area distributed across an enterprise network. With vSAN, the user is able to decide on the storage requirements, performance and availability and makes sure the policies put in place are upheld. These are not the only benefits of using VMware vSAN. Keep reading to discover four ways your enterprise can benefit from it.
Think about how much data your company created in 2016. According to IDC, the world collectively created about 16.3 zettabytes (yes, a zettabyte is a billion terabytes). They also predict that the world will create 10x that amount by the year 2025. Approximately 90% of that data will be stored in file and object storage. While consumers have traditionally created the bulk of the data up to now, enterprises will create 60% of the world’s data in 2025. At that time, ten percent of all data will be created by IoT. This brings with it a number of challenges as a result of this exponential growth.
Imagine for a moment that you are calling technical support for a traditional storage solution. You are first greeted by a customer service representative whose job is to take basic information about your problem at hand and forward it on to the appropriate technical support technician or engineer. The representative will ask for the usual product ID numbers, your name, contact information, and remind you of the expiration date of your current service contract. Once your customer profile is established, the barrage of questions begins:
Software defined storage (SDS) has the potential to revolutionize your business processes and drive extraordinary value. However, storage isn’t just measured by capacity. In our previous blog post, we laid out the example of thinking of your organization’s storage infrastructure like a virtual city: there are specific places designated for each type of data, from highly-utilized information to archives. Because of this, there is a true need for segmenting your resources; today, SDS is finally allocating true Automated Storage Tiering (AST) for enterprises. AST has created a natural and timely partnership with flash storage to offer the speed and performance that personal computing devices have enjoyed for years and many organizations are now considering all-flash based arrays to meet the demands of server virtualization.
