Big Data Retires Your Data Storage Infrastructure... So Now What?

By Shahbaz Ali, President & CEO, Tarmin

Shahbaz Ali, President & CEO, Tarmin

Big data is flooding organizations while the industry scrambles to get grips with the new data-driven economy and what that means for businesses. This accelerated data growth phenomenon has put organizations of every size, industry and location in a state of transformation, one in which the implications of this data growth continues to unfold around us. This pervasive trend is here to stay, it’s time to get ahead of the curve.

Technology advancements are driving the variety and velocity of data to increase, while current data storage and management solutions are struggling to keep pace with growing volumes. Most organizations have storage architectures based on decade-old infrastructures and technology, retrofitted with a handful of modern components and marketed as next-generation. In reality, these solutions are packed with complexities, bottlenecks, expensive upgrades and the inherent need for over provisioning.

Tried and True Will No Longer Do —Move over Traditional Storage Architecture

Everything we’ve come to know about generating, storing and managing data has been flipped on its head within the last few years. Strategies and data management practices that worked for decades are showing signs of failure while putting organizations at risk–and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

"Tarmin and NetApp are well on their way to delivering benefits to customers who understand the importance of data centricity"

Fortunately, there’s a better way, a data centric approach to data management. This approach focuses on data centricity, drawing actionable insights from data itself, and managing it for, and according to, its value. Instead of focusing on existing media centric ways, data centric approaches enable organizations to build data management strategies based on the value of the data which creates an enterprise storage and data management architecture that goes beyond saving on capital hardware costs, reducing data related risks and optimizing storage.

Data Centric Approach to the Rescue

Flash, along with growing capacities, is driving massive data growth and a need for boundless scalability and performance. Data centric solutions provide a scalable storage infrastructure for leveraging media independent technology with enterprise object storage, enabling pay-as-you-grow flexibility and infinite scalability to keep pace with technology advancements. Additionally, organizations can apply distributed deduplication and compression at the chunk level across the entire data estate, improving storage optimization and reducing storage CAPEX.

Strategic data centric approaches focus on the value of data and employ technologies that extract full content and index metadata, at the time of ingestion. A distributed metadata repository is used to capture the value of data across distributed data stores. It does this by collecting all basic metadata and custom metadata, and conducting full text indexing and filtering of all standard and industry specific file types. By managing the metadata and storing it in a distributed repository, organizations are able to cross data type and location boundaries to deliver powerful enterprise search and e-Discovery capabilities, which improve search and discovery accuracy and retrieval times. This enterprise-wide storage layer simplifies data governance because all data is exposed, enabling organizations to build policies for data retention, preservation, access and security easily and consistently across all enterprise data sets. Executives can rest easy knowing they can confidently meet compliance mandates, as well as avoid corporate exposure.

Aside from the challenges associated with storing ever increasing quantities of data, organizations need to leverage the data, to make sound business decisions and for competitive positioning. Corporations are taking Big Data seriously; by implementing data centric data management strategies, the data repository can be a source for analytics tools, enhancing the quality, accuracy and time to achieve results.

Tarmin and NetApp Succeed in the World of Big Data

Tarmin, pioneer of Data Defined Storage, deployed its GridBank Data Management Platform in combination with technologies from NetApp, a multinational storage and data management company, to deliver a large financial services institution a multi-petabyte data centric solution, providing a compliance and retention repository with integrated data analytics. Tarmin delivered NetApp technologies to provide large scale flash arrays underlying Tarmin’s GridBank platform with Hadoop cluster integration to provide a customized solution to meet the high levels of performance required by the client.

Not only is it possible to change the way we view and think about data storage, it is imperative. Organizations such as Tarmin and NetApp are well on their way to delivering benefits to customers who understand the importance of data centricity. It’s time to overcome the hurdles that previously overwhelmed traditional data storage and allow organizations to painlessly meet the scalability and performance needs, while significantly reducing corporate risks and enhancing the value of data through on-demand access, search and analytics through the use of data centric solutions.