Address Your Company’s Data Explosion with Storage That Scales

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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

Experts predict that our world will generate 44 ZETTABYTES of digital data by 2020.

How about some context?

Now, you may think that these are all teenage selfies and funny cat videos – in actuality, much of it is legitimate data your company will need to stay competitive and to serve your customers.

The Data Explosion Happening in YOUR Industry

Some interesting factoids:

• An automated manufacturing facility can generate many terabytes of data in a single hour.
• In the airline industry, a commercial airplane can generate upwards of 40 TB of data per hour.
• Mining and drilling companies can gather multiple terabytes of data per minute in their day-to-day operations.
• In the retail world, a single store can collect many TB of customer data, financial data, and inventory data.
• Hospitals quickly generate terabytes of data on patient health, medical equipment data, and patient x-rays.

The list goes on and on. Service providers, telecommunications, digital media, law enforcement, energy companies, HPC research groups, governments, the financial world, and many other industries (including yours) are experiencing this data deluge now.

And with terabytes of data being generated by single products by the hour or by the minute, the next stop is coming up quick:  PETABYTES OF DATA.

Status Quo Doesn’t Cut It

I know what you’re thinking:  “What’s the problem? I‘ve had a storage solution in place for years.  It should be fine.”

Not quite.

1. You are going to need to deal with a LOT more data than you are storing today in order to maintain your competitive edge.
2. The storage solutions you’ve been using for years have likely not been designed to handle this unfathomable amount of data.
3. The costs of merely “adding more” of your current storage solutions to deal with this amount of data can be extremely expensive.

The good news is that there is a way to store data at this scale with better performance at a much better price point.

Open Source Scale Out Storage

Why is this route better?

• It was designed from the ground up for scale.
  Much like how mobile devices changed the way we communicate / interact / take pictures / trade stock, scale out storage is different design for storage. Instead of all-in-one storage boxes, it uses a “distributed model” – farming out the storage to as many servers / hard drives as it has access to, making it very scalable and very performant.  (Cloud environments leverage a very similar model for computing.)
• It’s cost is primarily commodity servers with hard drives and software.
  Traditional storage solutions are expensive to scale in capacity or performance.  Instead of expensive engineered black boxes, we are looking at commodity servers and a bit of software that sits on each server – you then just add a “software + server” combo as you need to scale.
• When you go open source, the software benefits get even better.
  Much like other open source technologies, like Linux operating systems, open source scale out storage allows users to take advantage of rapid innovation from the developer communities, as well as cost benefits which are primarily support or services, as opposed to software license fees.

Ready.  Set.  Go.

At SUSE, we’ve put this together in an offering called SUSE Enterprise Storage, an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by the open source Ceph project.

It delivers what we’ve talked about: open source scale out storage.  It scales, it performs, and it’s open source – a great solution to manage all that data that’s coming your way, that will scale as your data needs grow.

And with SUSE behind you, you’ll get full services and support to any level you need.

OK, enough talk – it’s time for you to get started.

And here’s a great way to kick this off: Go get your FREE TRIAL of SUSE Enterprise Storage.  Just click this link, and you’ll be directed to the site (note you’ll be prompted to do a quick registration.)  It will give you quick access to the scale out storage tech we’ve talked about, and you can begin your transition over to the new evolution of storage technology.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge