By Bill Mansfield, Solution Architect
Data volume is increasing exponentially and requires many businesses to deploy an unprecedented amount of storage along with advanced tools to manage their environments. While Big Data implies the need for “Big Storage,” the latest technology advances—from dedicated storage systems on solid state drives to software-refined, software-defined, and virtual storage—allow you to actually get more with less by using Smarter Storage.
Finding the right solution to achieve Smarter Storage requires a strategic roadmap to align storage with technology and business objectives. Essentially, this involves going through a Data Transformation Journey that reflects a carefully-planned evolution of your data and storage systems.
Each “level” in the journey delivers more improvements in storage efficiency, performance, availability, usability and visibility:
- Components: At this first level, the storage technologies now available—including disk arrays, flash, cloud, and software defined storage — are still treated as isolated disk silos, increasing storage waste and administration.
- Virtualize: This is where the impact of Smarter Storage on efficiency and availability takes hold—using advanced features such as pooling, tiering and thin provisioning.
- Systematize: There are now new ways to protect data beyond simple backup and new ways to manage files. These include flat backup, archive and hierarchical storage management.
- Visualize: At this level, you gain insights from the data; visualization turns boring rows of numbers into multi-dimensional, graphical displays.
- Rationalize: This level adds coherency to unstructured data and establishes governance policies.
- Analyze: This final level provides data analysis results that are valid and understood by all.
Once you identify your current level in the Data Transformation Journey, you can uncover potential opportunities and identify the next logical level in your journey. Moving through all the steps enables you to achieve efficient, high-performing, highly-available, and easily-managed data and storage—while also reducing the storage resources you require for all of your Big Data.
To find out more about extracting business value from Big Data through Smarter Storage, we invite you to download the free Logicalis white paper, The Data Transformation Journey.