The rising tide of data represents both an operational headache and a business opportunity. As ever more stringent regulations around data preservation and protection come into force, businesses must spend more time, effort and money on storage. But at the same time, much of the data you are gathering can be mined to deliver new insights and support better business decision-making.
The key challenge is to maintain high-speed access to the data you need on a day-to-day basis, while simultaneously keeping down the cost of storing data you need either infrequently or only for regulatory purposes. Traditional approaches to data storage are struggling today: adding capacity to existing systems drives up expenditure, and manually migrating data between onsite and offsite systems introduces risk, delay and yet more costs.
Software-defined storage separates the storage logic and management from the underlying hardware, dramatically reducing both the complexity and the costs.