UNCOVERING THE LAYERS
Neil Stobart, Vice President, Global
System Engineering at Cloudian
types of questions are much harder to
answer accurately without full visibility
across the entire storage infrastructure.
That’s why modern businesses need
access to tools that provide a full,
graphical view of their infrastructures.
With such tools in place, they will be
able to react to potential problems
swiftly and proactively across all
locations before they start to cause more
serious issues, in turn enabling more
intelligent management.
How does this link to issues
around scalability?
The capacity and performance scalability
of data storage systems must be key
considerations for modern organisations –
especially those that are heavy data users.
Traditional ‘scale-up’ storage platforms
have definite scalability limits and once
the limits are reached, the only option is to
expand by adding separate independent
storage systems. This adds to the
management overhead (i.e. more devices
to manage) and datasets are split between
devices, making it more difficult to locate
and use data together as intended.
This presents a need for distributed
storage systems with ‘scale-out’
architectures. Such systems allow for
the use of standard commodity server
hardware to build large-scale clusters
that provide the storage capacity and
performance needed to meet today’s
data explosion challenges. Datasets are
stored in a single virtual namespace, even
though the data itself is distributed across
multiple devices, thereby removing the
issue of data being tied to independent
storage devices.
Distributed storage systems can also be
dispersed across multiple geographical
locations, with the management software
providing flexibility to manage data
consistency, availability, protection and
Business Continuity requirements.
What benefits can businesses
realise by increasing their
understanding of and visibility
into their cloud infrastructures?
Many businesses today employ hybrid
cloud infrastructures, which can make it
extremely difficult and demanding for IT
teams to maintain full awareness of the
data usage across the entire environment
and accurately monitor cost of the public
cloud component. On top of the basic
cost of cloud storage, businesses also
must account for costs associated with
network bandwidth and data egress fees
– both of which can quickly creep up,
especially in large organisations.
This is where having access to a graphical,
panoramic view of the entire storage
infrastructure can make a major difference.
This will enable businesses to get a
detailed look at their usage by filtering for
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