2024 - Hot Topics in Enterprise Storage

Data Growth, Cybercrime, AIO/s, Storage Guarantees and more

Talk about storage. What’s being discussed around the proverbial “water cooler” in enterprise storage industry circles? Conversations about enterprise storage help organizations identify new perspectives, new solutions and new benefits.

1. Explosive growth of data by 2025. What does it mean for storage?

The global datasphere continues to grow exponentially. IDC has tracked an increase in data from 33ZB in 2018 to a projected 175ZB by 2025, while Statista projects data growth to reach 180ZB by next year.

This explosive growth in data is symptomatic of how much data is being used – and therefore, creates significant demand for enterprise storage.

Here’s the key point for CIOs to consider as they develop their future plans:

• Just because there is enormous growth in data and the increased need for more storage capacity, enterprises don’t need to have “explosive growth” in their IT budgets to handle it.
• Given this severe budget limitation, storage consolidation is a strong, powerful strategy to adjust to huge leaps in data. Enterprises should be striking down complexity associated with traditional approaches to dealing with data growth – more, more, more. No, a smarter strategy is less, less, less – and this is what Infinidat specializes in for enterprises that are forward-thinking and don’t want to be caught awkwardly on their back foot when the implications of explosive data growth wash over you like a tsunami.
• In addition, this increase in data will exacerbate the already tremendous IT skills gap. There will be a greater need for more qualified IT professionals to be able to help enterprises navigate through the overwhelming bursts of data. But there are not enough capable IT pros available to direct at the problem.
• Just to put these data numbers in perspective: if astronomers are processing 10PB petabytes of data every hour from a telescope, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, 1EB of data is generated every 4 days of operation. It takes 1,000EBs to equal one zettabyte.
• According to University of California researchers, if all human speech ever spoken were digitized into 16-kilohertz 16-bit audio files, it would be over 42ZB. This speaks to the magnitude of the datasphere that has taken shape and has made the storage of data, in a general sense, extremely important to the future of humankind.
• You need to simplify the storage infrastructure to adeptly handle petabytes and petabytes of data in your data centers and hybrid cloud storage configurations, by leveraging services-oriented automation to automatically and autonomously store the data. Infinidat focuses on enterprise storage, but our best practices can be adopted in other areas of storage as well, including cloud storage.

 

2. Cybercrime is getting worse. How can storage help?

Cybercrime is a $9.5 trillion attack vector, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. It’s not shrinking. Rather, it’s expanding again, enormously, which makes it all the more problematic that too many enterprises are leaving their enterprise storage systems vulnerable to cyberattacks due to lack of intelligent cyber resilience and recovery.

Even though the most valuable data of a company is stored on their enterprise storage systems, it’s ironic that storage is often left out of a company’s overall cybersecurity strategy. The question is not “if” your enterprise will suffer a cyberattack, but “when” and “how often.”

According to a 2023 Fortune 500 survey, the second biggest concern of CEOs is cybersecurity. One wonders if CEOs will soon have the security of enterprise storage on their minds, too, if IT leaders don’t address the interconnection of cybersecurity and cyber resilient storage. Enterprises are in desperate need to shore up their cyber protection on the storage front. There’s no question that you should be using immutable snapshots (unalterable snaps of data) for reliable, rapid recovery of data. But there is one more piece of the cyber puzzle that is critical to have a well-rounded cyber resilience implementation – cyber detection. This capability has a twofold purpose. Cyber detection serves as an early warning system to help you protect the data. It can conveniently tie into data center-wide security software, revealing what is being detected and seen from a cyber standpoint.

The second useful purpose is after a cyberattack has occurred. With cyber detection, you can get to a known good copy of data faster. It’s vital to have a clean copy because if you recover data that has hidden malware or ransomware in it, you are going down a self-defeating path.

Malware and ransomware do not pound their chest like King Kong. They are much more surreptitious, lurking and hard to detect.

This is why you need ML-driven cyber detection to scan the data in primary storage and secondary storage for any corruption before you recover it. Other security scans that an enterprise does may not detect the malware or ransomware at all, even though it is hidden there. The most effective way to identify it and root it out is a cyber detection capability built into the primary storage system.

If an enterprise, or service provider, does not have cyber resilient storage, the damage that cyber criminals can do is significant, and it’s the equivalent to leaving a bank vault door open and unguarded. Storage of a company’s data, which is among its most valuable assets, can no longer be considered separate from a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

3. Are storage guarantees real?

Guarantees are real; however, the most important question is: does the guarantee have teeth?

In other words, is it backed up? Is it comprehensive? Does it really benefit you if you don’t get what you are expecting through SLA?

For example, at Infinidat, we have guarantees on cyber storage resilience and recovery, performance, and 100% availability. Some other vendors have a guarantee on availability only.

Other vendors have a guarantee on performance, while some other vendors have guarantees for cyber on backup, but not on primary storage. This is the reality.

A reason why Infinidat’s guarantees are real and have “teeth” is because there is a penalty for not delivering what we say we will deliver for primary and secondary storage. We put our money where our mouth is. Furthermore, our guarantees are comprehensive. Not just moderately comprehensive, like a few other vendors, but fully comprehensive.

Guarantees should not be seen with skepticism. A fair analysis should be conducted to examine how comprehensive each one is and how much “teeth” each one has.

Guarantees are everywhere in the consumer world. For instance, you get guarantees on your new car. If the engine breaks, they fix it for free. No one would find it strange if you bought a new car and the engine conked out in six months and, then, the car company either gives you a new car or replaces the engine.

Likewise, in enterprise storage, a guarantee basically says that the vendor is going to do whatever is possible and feasible to fix any unexpected issue that may come up. This guarantees orientation reflects a customer-centric mindset. But some are better than others.

 

4. What’s up with AIO/s? Why it matters to enterprise storage.

AI for IT Operations (AIO/s) in enterprise storage is a key aspect to simplifying IT operations, reducing administrative overhead, and adding a predictive layer onto the storage infrastructure. Its increasing in importance because of the industry shift toward a platform approach to enterprise storage.

AIO/s supports scalable, multi-petabyte storage-as-a-service (STaaS) solutions, enabling enterprises to centralize operations and improve cost management. The beauty of AIO/s is that the flexibility of capacity and workloads is much better managed.

Whether they call it AIO/s; yet or not, enterprises are seeking the IT “superpowers” of advanced predictive analytics, early issue detection, and proactive support, which are integral to enabling the storage-as-a-service experience. Indeed, this STaaS experience must be tailored to enterprise requirements and economics throughout the deployment lifecycle.

AIO/s is an approach that combines autonomous automation with analytics and some form of AI, such as ML, or better yet, deep learning, on a multi-layered technology platform. Infinidat’s Neural Cache is a great example of AIO/s technology, which provides deep learning capabilities within InfiniBox G4 hybrid, InfiniBox SSA G4, and InfiniGuard.

Neural Cache enhances storage with built-in intelligence that optimizes application environments and performance over time, essentially delivering a zero-touch, set-it-and-forget-it experience. This software capability dynamically adapts to changing application, user and performance demands – without administrative overhead. It enables 100% SLA-based guarantees, predictive abilities, and optimal combinations of underlying media.

5. Rising costs, constraints, and environmental impact in data centers

IT leaders are dealing with the rising costs of energy, floor space, rack space, cooling, and operational resources in data centers, as well as environmental impact. They are being required to do more in less space. The expense to power a data center, including storage arrays and servers, is only going up, affected by higher energy prices. IT budgets are being squeezed by escalating real estate costs. Last, but not least, the increasing need to dispose of old equipment and the rush to install new systems that produce more carbon emissions are having an environmental effect as well.

What should an IT manager who is overseeing or managing the storage infrastructure do in the face of these challenges? Where should the IT team focus to minimize the rising costs, make the most of space constraints, and responsibly reduce the environmental impact as much as possible?

Our Infinidat solutions have been designed to increase efficiency on-premises. With one of our enterprise storage solutions, you can double the capacity of your storage while reducing the footprint that your legacy storage arrays were taking up. You can get double-digit better energy efficiency than what you may be accustomed to. You need fewer personnel to manage the storage system. Doing more with less. Getting more for storage while spending less, using less energy, and taking up less space in the data center.

We have a $20 billion enterprise customer that went from 24 storage arrays from 3 different vendors to only 4 Infinidat array solutions, while a Fortune 100 customer reduced their storage infrastructure, going from 250 floor tiles to 50 floor tiles running all the same applications and workloads – a 5x reduction. This consolidation had many benefits, but one of the key ones was reducing the need for IT operational resources.

You reduce the environmental impact because you have more efficient, green IT-optimizing storage. You have less hardware to dispose of and you let off less carbon emissions than you did before you consolidated onto Infinidat’s enterprise storage solutions. You can meaningfully contribute to evolving your data center into a greener IT center of excellence.

We call it E2. You’re able to simultaneously decrease costs (economic benefit), while reducing the ecological effects (environmental benefit).

 

6. Single storage OS vs. multiple OSs

It’s a no-brainer: when you have to deal with multiple storage OSs across a vendor’s portfolio, you are forced to deal with complexity and additional IT operational costs.

It’s better to have a single OS that works across storage systems, including primary storage, secondary storage, and hybrid multi-cloud environments. The compatibility, efficiency, and simplicity of a single OS make the life of a storage admin much easier.

If your enterprise has too many storage arrays and you have to manage several different OSs – even across a single vendor’s storage products – the experience takes up more time than necessary, and there is more of a risk of a mistake, a distraction, or a breakdown. Why do you want the headache?

Let’s say you have 20 or more arrays installed today across 2 data centers. Storage consolidation will enable you to condense those 20 arrays into just two arrays, at petabyte scale. It knocks out the complexity of multiple OSs across three or more vendors, saving you time and money.

Customers and partners don’t have to deal with multiple OSs that all have their own requirements, procedures, and interfaces. You want to manage and leverage your storage infrastructure for the good of your business – not become a ‘master’ of all storage OSs on the market for the sake of it. Don’t waste your time.

One of the ways that the single OSs comes in very handy today in an Infinidat implementation is when the InfiniBox hybrid, InfiniGuard, and our InfuzeOS Cloud Edition are used as cyber backup targets. Whether the enterprise takes an on-premises or a hybrid cloud approach, the customer only has to interact with the same OS, which maximizes learnings and contributes to an overall better experience.