I’ll concede that you won’t find it in any medical dictionary, but it’s a genuine problem. Given the information explosion we are experiencing, it will come as no surprise that storing, protecting, managing and making use of all this data can be worrying and stressful. That’s especially true if it’s part of our job description.
How much data have we already generated?
Some estimates suggest by the end of 2020, there will be 40x more bytes of data than there are stars in the observable universe[1]. “Big data” is now “humongous data”. What makes life even more complicated is that much of the growth is coming from unstructured data. The kind that’s more difficult to collect, manage, and analyze. Things like social media content, mobile or smart device activity, video, audio and text.
But let’s be honest, none of this global data growth is going to make us particularly anxious.
Why? Because it’s someone else’s problem. What’s going to give us sleepless nights and get our pulse racing is the information growth we have to deal with in our own organization. The kind that affects us whether we’re users, IT operations professionals, or business owners and stakeholders.
The problem is not only the sheer volume of data involved, but also how we arrived at the current situation and the resulting “disorder” involved.
Let me explain. Very few organizations have the luxury of starting from scratch today with a “green-field” IT infrastructure, and with all the latest technologies and systems. Instead, what we are stuck with has evolved over time, often as a result of organic growth, business acquisitions, mergers or geographical expansion.
Today, most of us have ended up with a mixed, chaotic and confusing storage landscape. This often includes a combination of diverse traditional investments, along with more modern systems and cloud-based storage. It may also mean your storage is geographically dispersed. As Gartner puts it: “infrastructure is everywhere – so is your data[2].”
This blended style of environment inevitably results in storage silos which are incredibly complex, costly and difficult to manage. That sounds like a classic definition of “disorder.”
Achieving a state of calm, confident control
OK, enough of focusing on the problems. Frankly, it’s stressing me out just thinking about it. I’m guessing you’re probably feeling the same.
The question is: “how can we get to the heart of the problem and restore the level of control needed to manage our entire storage portfolio properly – all of it – wherever it’s located?”
What if you could:
- Save each of your users 20 minutes a day because they don’t have to struggle to find files. Or cut the number of trouble tickets by 10% that your overworked IT operations team has to deal with every day.
These are the productivity and collaboration improvement levels that can be achieved by creating a global namespace spanning your entire storage portfolio (NAS, file servers, object storage and cloud storage). Combined with advanced search capabilities, your users and applications gain visibility, fast access and control of all your widely-scattered data.
- Improve storage utilization rates by up to 75% and remove the risk of stranded capacity with advanced global thin provisioning, deduplication and compression capabilities.
- Free yourself from the nightmare of six-figure storage upgrades, while optimizing OPEX costs and performance, with state-of-the-art data movement to tiered storage based on predefined policies.
- Attain peace of mind by being confident your data is secure and properly protected with advanced encryption, automatic load balancing, replication, recovery and snapshot functionality.
- Lower your frustration levels with the ability to integrate and begin managing your diverse storage systems in less time than it takes to boil an egg.
This is the approach we’ve taken here at Datacore with vFilO. It is the next-generation distributed file storage solution that delivers all this functionality.
It’s all about CURING Data Disorders to overcome stress and anxiety. That works for me and resonates with most of the IT professionals I talk with every week.
If you’d like to know more, why not give us a call to discuss your particular requirements or Get Started to see for yourself.
[1] Source: Domo.com. Data Never Sleeps 7.0
[2] Source: Gartner. Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2020
