(This post originally appeared on Direct2Dell, The Official Dell Corporate Blog)
Enterprise storage is trending away from traditional, enterprise managed network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN) towards a more complex environment that includes software-defined and cloud-based solutions. Spinning disks are also being replaced with flash arrays and solid state devices. These transformations are driven by challenges associated with the parallel processing of unstructured data within a near-real-time business operational tempo. Technology advances that exemplify this transition include:
- Big Data – The analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying and information privacy of extremely large, complex and unstructured data sets.
- Enterprise Applications – Business applications characterized by their complexity, scalability requirements, distributed and component-based architecture and mission-critical nature (especially CRM and ERP).
- Microservices – The creation and delivery of software application functionality as a suite of services instead of as a tightly coupled monolith of software code.
- Containers – Operating system level virtualization in which the virtualization layer runs as an application within the operating system. In this approach, the operating system’s kernel runs on the hardware node with several isolated guest virtual machines installed on top of it.
- Social Networking - web-based services that allow individuals to create a public profile, create a list of users with whom to share connections, view, and cross the connections within the system. These platforms are used to build social networks or social relations among people and organizations that share similar interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
These statistics describes an enterprise environment that demands heavy and time-sensitive use of recently acquired data. From an economic viewpoint, storage is, in fact, one of the largest single costs in the data center. “About five years ago, storage represented about 20 percent worth of the cost of a fully loaded computing stack. Last year in 2015, it represented about 40 percent of the computing stack thanks to factors like machine-generated and mobile data.” The demands introduced by this sort of environment is why hybrid storage arrays have become popular. This approach to enterprise storage delivers a crucial “middle ground” solution between high speed/high cost solid-state storage pools and more economical hard disk based resources. In doing so, it enables the use of a more optimal 3-tier storage architecture capable of near-real-time optimization across the disparate demand of multiple enterprise application.
Figure 1-
Comparative cost of storage technologies
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This trend also lends credence to a belief that the 2020 IT infrastructures will be underpinned by storage technologies that can support software-defined management of multiple storage pools across a hybrid IT landscape. New approaches to application virtualization are also having a revolutionizing effect on the use of data storage. Operational requirements for big data analytics on unstructured data