Organizations are confronted by an avalanche of data that they have a hard time managing and deriving any value from. In many cases, the data has sat in silos for years and too often, organizations don’t even know what they have.
In more extreme cases, a large company could produce 2 petabytes of data a day and still want to analyze roughly 150 terabytes a day, but until now, they have lacked the ability to adequately store, access, analyze, and protect that data.
Your customers can start to derive real value from this data via software-defined storage. Think of software-defined storage as a system of abstracting data storage so that the provisioning and management of storage are separated from the underlying hardware. This lets separate pools of physical storage resources be managed as a single, logical device that can run across public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
“We try to get people to think of data storage not just as another traditional IT play where we tell people, ‘here’s some spinning disks, go store something,’” says Jason Hardy, global CTO for the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) at Hitachi Vantara.
Instead, Hardy gets IT teams to understand what he calls the four Vs: volume, velocity, variety, and value.
Hardy tells IT managers to start by asking what’s the volume of data that needs storage? What kind of velocity does the business need? Do they really need to analyze that 150 terabytes a day? Or can some of that get offloaded to the cloud? What are the data types managed? What’s the breakdown of structured to unstructured data? And finally, what kind of value can the organize derive from the data?
Ken Clipperton, lead analyst for storage at the Data Center Intelligence Group (DCIG), says when he was a CIO at a large educational institution, they derived value from granular metadata. They would analyze the number of swipes that were made at the cafeteria every day, and how often students swiped their IDs to enter the dorms. “Once we untapped the data, we got a better understanding of what the students wanted, so we knew what services to focus on,” explains Clipperton.
High Marks for Hitachi Vantara’s HCP
In a study of software-defined storage vendors, Hitachi Vantara’s HCP was rated as one of the Top 5 vendors.
Todd Dorsey, a storage analyst at DCIG, says HCP scored highly for its wide deployment support, saying it can adapt to a customer’s specific situation. HCP also has robust analytics features.
All of the Top 5 vendors offer value-added services, including managed services and consulting. DCIG recognized HCP’s auto-tiering features where IT managers can establish five different tiers to automate how many copies of data can be stored and move between different classes of storage. There’s also multi-tenant services, meaning IT orgs can provide smaller storage increments. HCP also includes a chargeback feature for budgeting an invoicing.
Ready to learn more? Watch the webinar “A Fresh Perspective on Software-Defined Infrastructure.”
Download the DCIG Top 5 Enterprise SDS Universal Storage Systems Report.
Image Source: Getty Images / Hitachi Vantara