Below is the recent Blog post written by DataCore's CEO George Teixeira
which was recently featured on the Fusion-io
main Blog site.
65 million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid
ended the reign of the dinosaurs, reopening ecological niches that were promptly
filled by members of the class Mammalia, one of which, a long time later, went
on to invent things like writing, the wheel, and information technology.
Big Data—ultra large
scale data storage and analysis—is the storage market’s equivalent of that big
rock, but rather than causing mass extinction, it’s simply opening up a lot of
new ecological niches for storage technologies, especially advanced solutions
like Fusion ioMemory modules and the new release of DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisor. The advent of Big Data also offers a unique opportunity
to re-architect your storage management infrastructure in a way that can prolong
the life of storage “dinosaurs” and make it more adaptable in every respect and
more easily aligned to business needs.
As profiled in the New
York Times, Big Data is transforming business, government, and education.
One researcher reported that a study of 179 large companies showed that those
adopting the data-driven decision-making that Big Data makes possible “achieved
productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors
could explain.”
Big Data is more than just big. It’s restless, too, and
best used when hot. Let it cool off, and you lose the situational awareness that
can lead to big-time financial rewards. It’s not just a matter of storing a
gazillion bytes—you can’t possibly store it all, so your retention policies have
to change, and the need to widely share data as quickly as possible means your
networking strategies have to change as well.
Fortunately, a storage
hypervisor can be a big help in adapting to Big Data. Even better, the benefits
of this software layer, which insulates you from all the hardware variables that
Big Data can throw your way, kick in long before Big Data arrives. A scalable
and comprehensive storage hypervisor like DataCore’s SANsymphony-V is an agent
of change: you get the pay-off today and a future-proof storage infrastructure.
It also, as we’ll see, can give you an even better return on your Fusion-io
ioMemory module investments.
SANsymphony-V provides a complete "storage
management stack" and gives you a centralized console that enables you to
efficiently pool all your storage resources, mirror and replicate data for high
availability, cache data near applications for higher performance, automatically
allocate space, and direct traffic to the optimal tier.
Resource pooling
has the most immediate impact, because you can aggregate all of your storage
capacity, without regard for brand, model, or interface, and easily reclaim
unused space. These pooled resources can be easily mirrored locally for high
availability, or replicated remotely for disaster recovery. Thin provisioning
gives you just-in-time storage allocation for highly efficient use of disk
space, and RAM caching speeds up “spindle-based” storage dramatically to
turbocharge native disk array performance. The fact that all of these advantages
are available to every storage resource managed by SANsymphony-V means that
older storage that formerly might have been shuffled off to the dinosaur’s
graveyard remains useful longer, leading to a higher ROI for all your storage
investments.
Fusion-io Fast Flash Memory and DataCore
Auto-tiering Software
When it comes to Big Data, however, it’s
probably auto-tiering that’s likely to be of most interest to customers who rely
on Fusion-io technology. SANsymphony’s auto-tiering can dynamically direct
workloads to the right storage resource based either on access frequency or
business rules, so that the hottest data gets the most attention. Older storage
can be moved down-tier as new hardware is installed, again prolonging its
service life. SANsymphony-V also offers a “cloud gateway” to leverage cloud
service providers for both disaster recovery and archival of virtually unlimited
capacity—a necessity to keep from getting squashed by Big Data.
This
enables SANsymphony-V to put Fusion-io’s server class memory tier at the very
top of an agile, easily-managed storage hierarchy that offers unprecedented
levels of performance and availability. You can easily balance data value and
the need for speed against price/capacity constraints—something that Big Data is
going to make ever more necessary—and make sure that you get the utmost benefit
from ioMemory modules.
The fallout from Big Data is going to transform
business computing at every level, so if you don’t want to end up a data
dinosaur, now’s the time to transform your infrastructure with a
storage hypervisor. A good place to start is Jon Toigo’s Storage Virtualization
for Rock Stars series, starting with Hitting the Perfect Chord
in Storage Efficiency, which will give you a good overview of how a
storage hypervisor can help you increase engineering, operational, and financial
efficiency.
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