Object storage has come of age and purports to be the go-to for handling large amounts of unstructured data whilst keeping you in control of both costs and the management overhead, says Craig Hatter, Regional Manager, Northern Europe, DataCore Software - but how can you be sure that object storage will fulfil your organisation's needs?
The first step in evaluating any technology should be to determine the exact problems you are trying to solve and then determine how will this new technology enable your IT team to save time and resources, increase productivity or revenue, and/or decrease risk.
For object storage, this is an interesting process because even though the technology has been around for over a decade, the problems that object storage solves are relatively new to many organisations and here's why:
REALISING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM There will have been many times when using a new domestic device that your immediate thought was, "Why didn't I buy this sooner?". The reason you thought this way is because you most likely found a temporary work-around to fix the problem you had, and when you finally used something properly designed for that specific problem, the task or issue you were trying to solve becomes much easier.
This concept is magnified in the storage world because you can easily store data on different tiers of storage that provide different benefits. In other words, you may not even know you have a problem because you found a work-around, but what if that work-around is leading to reduced revenue, reduced resources, and increased risk? How do you determine this?
As stated, object storage has been around as a commercial concept for well over a decade, but has only recently gained mainstream usage. Why this lag in uptake? The answer is that the problems that object storage solves are now being experienced by many more organisations. From a high level, these problems fall into three categories:
- The need to scale - The ability to store and protect growing data capacities, which are increasing to hundreds of TBs or PBs, as well as file counts increasing to hundreds of millions, and even to billions of files!
- Distributed, web-based access - Traditional applications, web applications, and end-users (employees, clients, or subscribers) all now need to easily and reliably deliver, store, and access data over the internet. Even more so since Covid-19.
- Total Cost of Ownership (economics) - The ability to do what is needed within budget, with resources that are attainable and with minimal impact to existing lines of business
- How to tell if you have a problem scaling: One of the tell-tale signs that you have a problem scaling are low disk or no-space errors. However, one less obvious sign to non-programmers is a "stuttering" application. This may materialise as a client error over HTTP (404 or 408 error); lengthy web page load times, or some other time-out or "not found" type of error message. These errors are also related to access but may be caused by file system-based storage that is slowing due to capacity limitations. Failing to move warm or cold data off primary storage can lead to significant quality of service issues as storage nears full capacity.
- How to tell if you have a distributed access problem: In addition to 404 or 408 errors, distributed access problems can also be identified by the complexity of workflows and time spent on enabling external data access. You may have had to cobble together a bunch of different technologies such as WAN acceleration, web servers, or content delivery networks. You may still be struggling with slow FTP servers. Or, maybe you are still managing access to your network with logins and passwords manually on a spreadsheet.
- How to tell if you have an excessive storage cost of ownership problem: It's worth calculating the amount of time you actually spend managing storage. This would include, but is not limited to, solving technical issues due to the misuse of storage solutions; or trying to stretch overloaded administrative resources without being able to store or protect scaling data sets appropriately - it all adds to the total cost of ownership of your systems.
The other part of this issue is risk. Sometimes because of budgetary concerns, organisations spend too much on scaling primary storage and somehow fail to invest in proper business continuity or disaster recovery planning. If data becomes unprotected, you risk data loss, data corruption or a data security breach. Using object storage, you can ensure rapidly scaling datasets are continuously protected and instantly accessible.
"If you are trying to do more with the same budget, then you will need to do something different. This typically requires utilising a more cost-effective technology, one that automates a number of processes and frees up administrative resources. Object storage is different to other storage in that it offers self management and self healing, allowing fast capacity additions and hardware refreshes."
These issues materialise as employees or subscribers become unable to access the data or content they need when they need it. They may also materialise as overloaded administrative resources being diverted to focus on processes that do not help grow a business.
Searching for data can also be an issue in these distributed environments. Using object storage is powerful allowing you customise metadata, and usually access files across a single namespace through S3/HTTP, NFS and SMB.
If you are trying to do more with the same budget, then you will need to do something different. This typically requires utilising a more cost-effective technology, one that automates a number of processes and frees up administrative resources.
Object storage is different to other storage in that it offers self management and self healing, allowing fast capacity additions and hardware refreshes. Some of the advanced object stores offer unified web console for admins and end-users to track performance trends and mange/monitor content usage quotas and allow you to manage thousands of tenants and billions of files across multiple sites and unlike devices. Compare that with what you have today!
More info: www.datacore.com
