Since our last installment, your business has been busy creating and storing even more data. We’re already looked at some significant ways to get a handle on the seemingly unrelenting growth of data. There are other measures that you can institute right away that can help you to control your data growth while keeping information accessible, useful, and well protected. Here are a few additional measures to consider:
Cloud-based Storage opens up a whole new universe in data growth management. As opposed to installing and administering applications and data on-site, companies are now migrating their IT storage infrastructure to the cloud, or servers located off-premises. In the IBM AIX realm, there are myriad cloud-based solutions for storage and for backup solutions. These include IT recovery services such as cloud-based backups, disaster recovery, high availability, and replication services. Both applications and actual data can be housed on the cloud; this eliminates the need for companies to maintain their own equipment, potentially saving countless thousands of dollars. Cloud hosting makes it easier to scale storage as well; customers use only the storage they need as they need it, while the vendor can add more storage as warranted. Cloud hosting reduces administrative overhead concomitant with older systems’ provisioning technology. It’s tailor-made for IBM AIX systems.
Software-defined Storage, or SDS, focuses on the software services that can be performed on its managed hardware; it concerns itself mainly with managing policy-based data provisioning and storage management — regardless of the underlying hardware. It may include provisioning for storage-centric features such as duplication, replication, or data snapshots. A single interface accomplishes these tasks for many storage assets, whether they are siloed, consolidated, or virtualized.
Solid-state Drives, or SSDs, have the same characteristics as traditional hard-disk drives; they are configured in traditional factors such as 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives, and usually use standard storage interface features such as Fibre Channel, SATA, or SAS. They are designed to replace spinning media; they use Flash storage technology instead of magnetic media to read, write, and store data. The result is improved system performance as well as reduced response and processing time.
Flash Storage Arrays Flash storage — any storage technology that uses flash memory —includes USB pen drives, cell phone and MP3 player storage, single flash chips that are integrated into circuit boards and for data growth purposes, different types of hybrid and integrated Flash arrays. They improve performance through architectural improvements, reduced disk access latencies, and by using software to eke out more performance from flash and non-flash drives.
Object Storage, a form of software-defined storage that treats all forms of files, unstructured data, and system data and resources (including disk, tape, and server-based flash) as a collection of objects belonging to a single virtual pool, can be a big help in managing data growth. With object storage, each object contains its actual data, or payload, along with meta-data about the object. Since all data are treated as objects, this method overcomes the limits of the ‘blocks and files’ traditional file systems and provides improved system performance and administrative benefits.
While any of these methods can help you to keep data under control, more and more IBM AIX businesses are embracing the cloud as the smartest, most efficient and most cost-effective way to store, manage and control their data. The data control experts at CloudFirst. can show you how migrating data to the cloud can make a world of difference for your business today, and into the future.
