Meet Rising Data Challenges With Storage Modernization

Though storage systems and cloud storage services are well known, organizations should consider enhancing a handful of key areas in their storage infrastructure to prepare for the future. While some consider storage systems, management software and services to be commodities, differentiation between offerings can determine the scalability, flexibility, efficiency and resiliency of the data storage infrastructure. 

Organizations should seek out offerings that are scalable across multiple dimensions. Scalability of storage capacity is essential given that annual data growth of about 30% is common. Performance scalability is key; customers should look for offerings that allow for nondisruptive controller upgrades to boost the performance of storage clusters when necessary. In our research, we found that a third of respondents have been negatively impacted by slow storage performance, which leads to lower employee productivity, lost revenue, penalty fees and decreased customer satisfaction, among other negative impacts.

Flexibility is another area for improvement. Companies should look for options that can simultaneously handle storage connectivity across multiple storage types (block, object, file and software-defined storage), as well as across storage protocols (NFS, CIFS, S3) and networks (fibre channel, ethernet, etc.). Consolidating platforms allows organizations to eliminate storage silos to reduce operational burdens and simplify the infrastructure.

Efficiency has always been important in storage evaluations, but now is even more so due to the rising costs of infrastructure, power and rack space. Deduplication, compression and snapshots/clones can boost the effective capacity of storage systems to ensure customers get maximum value out of their storage. 

It is important to consider data placement and optimization when looking to control costs. Customers can lower storage asset costs by using tiering capabilities to move stale data that is no longer being used. The physical location of data is also important, not only for edge environments far away from primary datacenters, but also across the globe for organizations with data sovereignty requirements that limit which countries data can reside in.

The Importance of Proactive Management

Given the high operational costs associated with storage, organizations can benefit from proactive management tools that leverage AI and machine learning to analyze infrastructure assets and provide warnings and tips for reducing the potential for outages. Customers should seek out management offerings that can handle many tasks and provide a wide variety of insights on workloads and infrastructure elements (i.e., servers, storage and networking) without requiring separate tools to learn and maintain. Having fewer tools makes it easier for generalists to deal with issues and can improve security by reducing the potential threat surface.

Resiliency for data storage and workloads is becoming more important as the cost of outages continues to escalate at a rapid pace. According to 451 Research study data, 2024 outages cost $2.3 million on average compared to $1.6 million on average in 2022. Security issues such as ransomware and viruses were the second-leading cause of outages for survey respondents, and nearly a third experienced an outage within the last two years.

Since storage and backup assets are now being targeted in cybersecurity attacks, organizations should look beyond system-level features such as snapshots and replication and consider using immutable storage to prevent unauthorized data deletions and corruption. Integrated ransomware detection is becoming a more common feature in modern arrays, and storage vendors often have optional ransomware recovery services that can help customers quickly recover from a cybersecurity incident.   

Future-Proofing Through Storage Modernization

Storage modernization is necessary not only to meet today’s requirements, but also to future-proof IT infrastructures as applications and workloads evolve. The next generation of modern workloads, such as GenAI, will not only leverage large datasets for training, but could also create new content that will add to the data storage burden. 

To learn more about storage modernization to future-proof your organization — including more sophisticated data management options that can help improve operational efficiency — read Rising data challenges drive storage modernization from S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research, commissioned by Hitachi.

Read more

• Analyst Content: Rising data challenges drive storage modernization, S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research, commissioned by Hitachi
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