CAIRO, Egypt, 9th March, 2015: “Big Data” is no longer
just another IT buzzword but rather a valuable business tool for organizations in
Egypt looking to gain a competitive advantage. Whether enterprises want to
attract new customers or deliver innovative products, the power and benefits of
big data are well documented. However, big data comes with a unique set of
challenges, particularly in terms of storage. Gartner research estimates that
40% of all organizations will double the size of their on-premise storage
infrastructure by 2016[1],
but even if this is the case, big data storage requirements go well beyond the
capabilities of traditional SAN and NAS storage systems.
Between
advances in technology and changes to legal and regulatory requirements
(particularly in consumer-facing industries), the sheer volume of data within
enterprises is spiralling out of control. If that wasn’t bad enough, the data
is no longer uniform and structured; whether it be an email, an image, a video,
an application log or even a GPS signal from a mobile device, organizations are
realizing that every single bit of data has the potential to offer valuable
insight. Traditional storage systems with their expensive and proprietary
components were not designed to handle such volumes of data and any attempt to
use these systems to store big data will prove to be extremely costly, not to
mention inefficient and inflexible.
It is estimated
that businesses generate between 40-60% more data each year, making it almost impossible
for IT managers to predict the necessary amount of storage capacity - something
that they would need to do upfront in the case of traditional storage systems.
Finally, there
is the issue of portability. Big data cannot be dealt with using traditional
solutions such as aggregation and data integration, due to the sheer volume of
data involved as well as the bandwidth limitations of wide-area networks
(WANs). Furthermore, the emergence of cloud computing and virtualization
requires IT managers to deploy data storage solutions that can be easily transported
from one environment to another.
Gerald
Sternagl, EMEA Business Unit Manager Storage at Red Hat says that if enterprises
in Egypt are to take advantage of big data and harness its potential, they need
to address these storage challenges. Rather than simply investing in larger
traditional storage systems, enterprises need to completely reinvent their
approach to data storage. Fundamental to this approach is the need for
enterprises to start thinking about their storage systems as data platforms
rather than static data destinations. In doing so, enterprises will be able to meet
both their current and future storage needs by satisfying five key success
factors for managing big data:
1) Delivering cost-effective scale and storage capacity
Probably the
most critical requirement for big data storage platforms is the need to be
agile and flexible enough to be scaled up (both in terms of capacity and
performance) to match the enterprises’ storage demands, with the caveat of
keeping CapEx and OpEx to a minimum.
Unlike
traditional NAS and SAN storage systems with fixed capacity, requiring either a
data purge or a very expensive ‘scale-up’ effort to accommodate extra data, big
data storage platforms take a ‘scale-out’ approach. This is achieved by
combining industry standard commodity servers with virtual or cloud storage
resources to create an easily managed storage system.
2) Eliminating need for data migration
Because
traditional storage systems have fixed capacity, growing businesses need to
balance their future data storage requirements with current budget constraints.
For this reason, enterprises need to migrate their data to newer systems
periodically. Depending on the volume of data, these migrations can be very
expensive, cause a drain on personnel, and can often lead to additional hidden
costs such as unplanned downtime or overrun leases. With some enterprises’ data
now approaching petabyte size, they need to avoid having to physically migrate
data from one environment to another.
3) Bridging legacy storage silos
In order to
keep pace with the exponential growth in data, enterprises with traditional
fixed capacity storage systems often end up accumulating extra storage systems.
Because these systems are disconnected from each other, this so called ‘storage
sprawl’ inhibits the ability of the enterprise to see the big picture and
extract any valuable insight from the gathered data. Rather than adding another
system into the mix, big data storage must be capable of bridging these legacy
silos.
4) Ensuring global accessibility of data
Given the sheer
volume of big data, limitations on WAN bandwidth and the consequences of a single
point of failure, a centralized approach to data management is no longer
practical.
Big data
storage platforms must be able to manage data distributed across global
enterprises as a single, unified pool.
5) Protecting & maintaining the availability of data
Traditional
storage systems rely on external backups and hardware redundancies to mitigate
loss of data and application downtime. Such a strategy is impractical for big
data, from an efficiency and a cost standpoint, due to the volume and
decentralized nature of the data. Big data storage platforms need to perform
automatic replication of the data to ensure that the data is instantly
available and extremely robust.
If enterprises in
Egypt want to gain a competitive advantage by harnessing the power of big data,
it is imperative that they take decisive action and address their data storage
system capabilities. Migrating from traditional fixed capacity storage systems
to an open, software-defined storage platform will allow enterprises to
circumvent all the pitfalls inherent in traditional systems at a fraction of
the cost and reap their rewards for years to come.
