Unstructured data is spiralling out of control, as the majority of organisations are unsure of the sort of data they have.
So says Kobus De Beer, enterprise marketing manager at Dell SA, who notes that, because of this uncertainty, businesses end up treating all data in the same manner.
This week, ITWeb, in partnership with Dell, rolled out a Storage Survey, which De Beer says aims to determine the challenges the South African market is experiencing that the storage industry might not be addressing or talking about.
According to De Beer, one of the biggest challenges the local market is facing is the vast volumes of data that are being created and how companies manage this, from creation and storage, to backup and archiving.
He explains that this results in scenarios where customers are sitting with the least important data on the most expensive storage or disks that end up taking up a lot of opex.
“Storage continues to grow at a rapid pace in all verticals in the market. We are seeing technologies like iSCSI [Internet small computer system interface] being more adopted in the market in big data centre environments. However, we are also seeing some fibre channel customers staying with their invested technology.”
“They should look at properly tiering their storage and data so that they can ensure data resides on the best suited disk. They must also ensure they have a best-practice backup and archiving strategy, where they make use of technologies like deduplication to remove any duplicate data from their environment.”
On securing data, De Beer believes having a solid storage strategy is the best way. “Many companies think that if they have a tape somewhere, their data is secure. They need to ensure they manage data efficiently from creation to archiving. We believe that one size does not fit all, and will address every customer in a unique way.”
The current trend among vendors is to assist customers in making their storage infrastructure as easy to manage as possible, from automating tasks to assigning storage to virtual machines, he points out.
“We are also seeing more and more consolidation of SAN [storage area network] and NAS [network attached storage] systems into unified architecture, which gives administrators less storage to manage,” De Beer notes.
Click here to complete the survey.
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