Few areas in IT get less attention than storage.
In the past, if you needed more storage, you simply ordered it. After all, storage was cheap. Now in the days of cloud computing, you simply provision for more.
However, taking a commodity approach to storage doesn't address the key storage issues that come with big data. With unstructured big data now comprising 80% of corporate data, and with data overall continuing to double worldwide every two years, how do you store and manage all of this data? See below for five ideas.
Not all unstructured data is used every day. Other data is accessed often and continuously. When large files of unstructured data such as videos and images are in demand, more processing and throughput is required to get them to users. Consequently, storage professionals must decide how to tier this data. Does it get placed in rapid access, solid state memory to afford users immediate access or in mid-level media such as hard drives that provide a medium level of data retrieval? Maybe it should be stored on tape or very slow hard drives that are known as cold storage and are only used for data that is sparingly accessed, or not at all? Storage professionals, with the help of storage automation technologies, must consider and make these type of decisions.
It's important to ask: What big data stays on premises and what goes to the cloud? And if you need to aggregate this data for purposes of analytics, how do you coordinate secure data integration and transfers between all of these data sources?
Storage professionals need to get involved in several ways. First, they need to lay out a storage architecture that is both on premises and in the cloud.
