For businesses today, data is the new currency. With innovations, such as Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), proliferating data points both inside and outside the enterprise, organisations have access to a growing mass of information.
Fortunately, with the right tools, this data can be analysed and converted into actionable business intelligence – providing firms with a level of insight into consumer behaviour and their own working that has never been reached before. As Tarkan Maner, chairman and CEO at Nexenta says, used to drive sales, cut costs and increase efficiency, many have been enticed by the benefits. Indeed, a recent Gartner report revealed that three quarters of businesses are investing or are planning to invest within the next year. With the investment level so high, the knock-on pressure on the rest of the technology ecosystem cannot go unaddressed.
The problem is that the business world already has too much data to cope with and, with the adoption of Big Data showing no signs of slowing, it’s a situation that can only worsen. The industry has gone into ‘development overdrive’ to solve this challenge. In an attempt to find new technologies which can efficiently crunch large quantities of data within tolerable elapsed times, innovation has spanned the spectrum of advanced data analytics and search-based applications to parallel-processing databases and data-mining grids. Despite this investment, though, there is still too much information to manage – indeed, other research (this time from Forrester) confirms that businesses are only analysing 12% of the data they collect.
What is starting to become clear, however, is that storage has become the critical bottleneck. As time and money has been spent innovating other aspects of the data centre, storage has not been awarded the same attention. Consequently, many firms are continuing to rely on their traditional legacy storage and data management setups; static solutions which were never developed for mass data collection and simply choke when faced with an avalanche of information.
Not only does this mean the architecture cannot scale intuitively to the fluctuating demands of Big Data, but unsuitable proprietary hardware and a single deployment location design means they can’t meet many of the required standards of data security either. As such, continued reliance on legacy solutions is preventing businesses from harnessing the true power of Big Data, and the issue will only exacerbate as companies, and innovations, become more data driven.
The development of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) has given businesses another option, though. Developed to give storage symmetry with the rest of the data centre, SDS enables businesses to implement agile setups from the ground up. Providing a high-performance flexible infrastructure, architectures can scale to meet the varying pressures of Big Data, ensuring mass data stores can be turned into valuable, actionable business intelligence. Furthermore, SDS also provides consistent high-performance and streamlined data flow – achieved through capabilities including automatic deduplication – meaning information is instantly retrievable and high-density applications can be deployed on demand.
Another notable development is the rollout of Open Source SDS (OpenSDS) solutions. These solutions also represent a sustainable, future proof, and affordable IT investment as capacity can be added with ease and code is constantly being perfected. For instance, if an organisation is reaching the limit of its SAN, they are able to buy more and simply cluster, unlike with traditional setups where an entirely new solution would need to be purchased. Additionally, OpenSDS solutions are hardware-agnostic, empowering companies to build completely bespoke setups without the worry of incompatibility between technologies.
Ultimately, faced with the pressures of Big Data, rigid legacy storage solutions are no longer suitable for this data centric world. With the need to collect and store ever-increasing volumes of information, Big Data is the straw that will finally break the camel’s back. As companies look for investment opportunities which represent good value and garner a high return, SDS ensures growing data stores can be turned in actionable business-intelligence both now and in the future.
The author of this blog is Tarkan Maner, chairman and CEO at Nexenta
