We are seeing an explosion in the growth of data today. Not surprisingly, many industry experts believe that we have entered a new era of Big Data. Along with accelerating growth of new data, the composition of new data is also changing significantly from traditional structured, block data to much more unstructured, file-based data. By 2015, it is anticipated that in excess of 85% of new storage capacity installed in organizations around the world will be for file-based data.
This new world of Big Data is introducing major challenges for enterprise IT managers as well as significant opportunities for businesses across all industry segments. To deliver the optimal storage platform for Big Data, a storage system must provide:
Massive capacity: To accommodate very large and growing data stores
Extreme performance: To minimize response and data ingest times and thereby keep up with the required pace of the business.
High Efficiency:
To reduce storage and related datacenter costs
Operational simplicity:
To be able to manage a growing, large-scale data environment without adding more IT staff.
While there are certain similarities with the needs of vertical industries’ Big Data, traditional Enterprise IT has its own set of business drivers that create a unique set of storage requirements including:
Data Security: To minimize risk and meet regulatory and corporate governance requirements
Data Protection: To ensure business continuance and availability to support business operations
Interoperability: To increase business agility and to streamline management
Predictable Performance: To increase productivity and better support business requirements
Today, the clear delineations that have existed between big data requirements and enterprise IT requirements have now blurred to the point that they are no longer distinguishable. The simple fact is that these two worlds are rapidly converging, creating a need for a fundamentally different way to meet the storage needs that enterprises will have going forward. To address these needs, organizations require an enterprise scale-out storage infrastructure that can meet the combined needs of this new world of Big Data and traditional Enterprise IT. We call this the “scale-out” imperative.
