In an age when many enterprises are moving toward virtual machines and software-defined networks, data archiving systems can seem perfectly archaic by comparison.
Many still rely on big, bulky appliances or outmoded tape drives that date back to the previous century. But more enterprises are beginning to see the value of modernizing their archives, especially as they encounter ever-rising data volumes in their day-to-day business.
A great example of the modern archive platform is Dell EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). ECS is a very different type of data archiving solution that presents a consolidated pool of geo-distributed data to enterprise users. Unlike traditional storage systems, which were designed to support basic (and infrequent) data access from a subset of applications over a LAN connection, modern archiving is designed for a new generation of web, mobile and cloud applications. These applications require multi-protocol support, access to structured and non-structured data, self-service provisioning to turn up/down new applications and a richer set of security features.
One of the biggest storage challenges facing enterprises today isn’t the volume of data, but the number of choices they have for storing that data. There are optical drives, tape drives, network-attached storage, hard disk drives, solid state drives, Flash drives and, of course, public cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. All of these options have their pros and cons, with some better suited to high-performance data (e.g., Flash).
Yet enterprises often struggle to match data with the right storage tier and technology. It’s estimated that only 25% of data in an enterprise data center is actively accessed data. The remaining 75% of inactive data could be more efficiently stored in an archiving solution, but often remains in a high-performance (and higher cost) storage system.
Using ECS as an archiving platform allows enterprises to safely and confidently move inactive data from high-end storage systems such as Flash onto a more cost-effective private cloud platform. Data users still get the performance and flexibility they need, while IT departments are able to reduce their high-end storage footprint and scale back their nightly backups. This modernized archiving approach effectively solves many of the problems presented by traditional archive solutions, such as:
- Inconsistent security policies across different data silos
- Limited connectivity between primary and secondary (i.e., archived) data
- Complexity in managing multiple storage systems/vendors
- Slow or difficult data retrieval
- Limited visibility into archived data
Which enterprises can benefit the most from a modern archive platform? Any enterprise that needs to:
- Provide a cloud-like storage experience to data users and app developers
- Update its legacy business applications
- Collect large amounts of structured and non-structured data
- Enforce security and access policies consistently across different locations
- Bring new services and applications to market faster
- Turn its data into a competitive advantage
One more point of consideration for modern archiving is cost. Research shows that ECS is nearly half the price of public cloud storage and even cheaper than tape storage. In other words, enterprises can improve data security and performance while also saving money. No wonder our customers are snapping up Elastic Cloud Storage for their own storage needs. ▪