Today’s business environments are highly data-intensive, leveraging analytics and insights to drive innovation and decision-making.
Yet, managing increased amounts of critical business data, complex workloads, and distributed storage environments can be challenging for organizations. Here are five specific steps you can take to reduce the most common data storage headaches.
Scale with Object Storage
As companies continue to store vast volumes of unstructured data for analysis and insights, scalability must be front of mind. Because data grows exponentially, you can’t always predict what your future storage needs will look like. Storage needs can change suddenly, overwhelming your current data storage capacity. As a result, you need storage that you can rapidly scale out or up to meet changing requirements.
Storing vast amounts of unstructured data in a directory system on block and file storage can be expensive and cumbersome to manage. Further, as it grows, performance can suffer.
Object storage is designed for scalability. It stores data in discrete units instead of directory hierarchies (like file storage) or fixed-sized blocks of data (as in block storage). Each discrete unit is identified using a unique key which allows it to be stored and retrieved from anywhere on a distributed system.
Use Tiered Storage to Improve Efficiency
Organizations store and use data in different ways. While enterprise workloads require reliable, high-performance storage like solid-state drives (SSD), infrequently used data doesn’t always need to be kept as available. Still, organizations must ensure that their storage solutions are flexible enough to maintain the expected performance levels required to meet their service level objectives.
Tiered storage helps you store data based on the minimum performance service tier it requires and on the lowest cost platform that can handle those requirements. If data access patterns change, data can be moved to a different tier without causing performance issues or system disruptions. FlashArray//X performance-optimized storage can help accelerate Tier 0 high-performance and Tier 1 mission-critical workloads.
Tip: Another approach is to consolidate any workload to a single repository. With software-defined storage, you’re not stuck with migrations or mixed performance on outdated commodity hardware.
Layer Security
Ransomware attacks continue to increase in number and complexity, resulting in more security breaches. But that’s not the only threat to data, arguably one of an organization’s most critical assets. Securing an organization’s network perimeter is the first line of defense from malicious actors, but employees with high enough privileges to secure data could still cause accidental or intentional data loss. The key is keeping data safe and easily accessible.
Implementing a tiered backup architecture in line with data security best practices can help you keep business-critical information safe and available. Using storage solutions that offer built-in data encryption adds an extra layer of security to ensure your critical data remains safe.
Pure as-a-Service
is a storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offering that leverages the intrinsic security features and capabilities of FlashArray, FlashBlade, and Pure1®. With always-on encryption at rest, protocol-level authentication, and SafeMode snapshots to mitigate ransomware, Pure as-a-Service gives you peace of mind that your data is always protected.
Future-Proof Your Infrastructure
Given today’s constant technological advances and the increased volumes of data they produce, you must think beyond what you need today. Data storage infrastructure needs to be ready to keep up with tomorrow’s requirements. Safeguarding your storage infrastructure with technologies that stay up to date into the future is a critical component of business agility and competitiveness. The key is taking a software-defined approach instead of a hardware-centric approach. The latter can require extensive migrations to upgrade, which is anything but future-proof.
The Evergreen Storage subscription model offers modern storage with the freedom to upgrade, expand, and continuously innovate. Rapid upgrades and expansion keep your storage infrastructure agile and up to date while reducing your total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage. Evergreen Storage gives your organization the ability to seamlessly scale your storage system without disruption to respond to today’s and tomorrow’s data demands while continuously protecting your investment.
Implement a Storage Management Solution
Increasingly distributed and complex systems make it more and more difficult for organizations to store and manage data. Not only do you have to manage larger amounts of heterogeneous data, but workloads have also become more complex.
An effective storage management solution ensures that data is available to applications and users when they need it. Among other benefits, a storage management solution streamlines the administration of storage to ensure data availability and reliability. It also ensures that security and compliance requirements are met. Automation of certain tasks can lead to stress reduction on IT teams and opportunities for DBAs to expand their roles and responsibilities.
Pure1 simplifies storage management by allowing you to view and manage all your storage arrays from a single central interface. With AI-driven optimizations and a customer-centric support system of humans and AI, Pure1 continuously monitors and proactively resolves issues in your array before they become problems.
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