Intelligent Data Management is key for your IT Data Strategy
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When people talk about enterprise data they talk about needing one data system, how they manage their data, where the data is kept, how the data is organised, the cost of managing the data and how easy it can be to access without compromising the user experience. So, let’s consider some of the challenges that IT managers have.
The Challenges faced
When it comes to accessing data one of the discussion points is always what needs to be available immediately and essentially what does not? Is the data accessed frequently, infrequently or hardly at all? Can the data be moved to tape?
One of the key reasons to look at data management is the impact on cost. Rarely used data could be stored on lower tiers of disc to save cost. Not getting this right can mean avoidable data storage costs.
Sprawling storage systems is another challenge faced by IT management. As well as the impact on cost, the insight can become limited relating to the nature and use of data under management. The result is many IT managers are compelled to treat all data similarly, no matter if it is business-critical, temporary, or legacy.
You take the above and you soon realise you need to consider an intelligent data management solution that is independent to your storage.
Exploding data growth
The data explosion continues and there are no signs of it abating soon. Now is the time to consider an intelligent data management software solution as a part of your data management strategy. Not considering one could result in costs potentially spiralling out of control.
The larger, more significant vendors have created intelligent storage management software solutions that can dynamically control data orchestration on storage classes. However, these storage management systems can lack the flexibility and intelligence many organisations demand. This type of software can lead the customer into a vendor lock-in situation and sometimes even more complexity for the customer’s data storage team – with increasingly complex software layers. One of the ways that companies are dealing with this, not just from a reducing complex management point of view, is by using independent intelligent data management software. It has the added benefit of avoiding vendor lock-in as well.
When you should consider independent data management software
Today, many organisations are turning to independent data management solutions that can help them by automatically analysing, understanding, and moving data to the most appropriate tier – no matter if the storage is a mix of vendor technologies or cloud-based systems.
These solutions are described as Data Management rather than Storage Management solutions. They orchestrate your data across all storage classes – and they intelligently choose the most appropriate storage system for each piece of data.
Modern Data Management Solutions such as those offered by companies like Komprise can work across all your file and cloud storage, moves data with full native access to all the compute at each tier, and eliminates lock-in. Additionally, the technology allows the data to be directly accessible within the cloud – without requiring access through the original file structure. This approach speeds data access and frees it from proprietary storage technology – while giving access to the full compute power and elasticity of the cloud alongside native services and applications.
When choosing the right solution, you need to consider:
- Analytics
- Transparent moving of data
- Intelligent data strategy
- Cost reduction
- Reducing complexity
- Improved user experience
- Impact on commercial agility
- Ability to analyse, mobilise, and monetise file and object data across clouds, data centres, and edge.
Freedom to access data independent of its storage silo
The ideal data management solution must give organisations transparent access to tiering that teams can control with user-defined policies. This means ‘cold’ data to be automatically moved to cheaper or slower storage – while ‘hot’ data is retained in faster storage for rapid access.
From a user experience perspective all of this smart data management for users and applications alike needs to be done whilst ensuring no change in the file structure is visible. Their data is right where they expect it to be.
Let’s talk about the Komprise solution. This solution manages to move data, leaving behind an industry-standard symbolic link that is dynamic and resilient. These links appear the same as the original data file and retain the same permissions and attributes. Users and applications can open and access the moved files from their original location precisely as before, without any changes.
Data back-ups can be minimised as the Komprise system retains only the ‘hot’ or essential data on your primary storage – dramatically shrinking the data footprint.
Access to cloud data without additional complexity
As the Komprise solution doesn’t move data in a proprietary format, and it will not get in front of hot data. This unique approach frees organisations from expensive licensing requirements for cloud access, allows cloud-native data analytics tools – and speeds up the delivery of hot data.
How Pfizer saved 75% on storage and cloud migration costs using Komprise
One organisation that deployed an intelligent data management solution from Komprise with significant effect was leading pharmaceutical company Pfizer, which operates a global heterogeneous NAS environment.
The Pfizer system had 5 petabytes of cold and unstructured data alone, of which 64% had not been accessed in over two years. Pfizer’s team needed to move the data while maintaining visibility, an ongoing strategy for applying business rules for analytics, and better insight into the data it was hosting. They engaged Komprise.
“What sets Komprise apart compared with other solutions is the end-to-end process of analysing and moving data,” said Caitlyn Possehl, Global Strategic Alliance Leader at Komprise. “You can use Komprise to scan all your data, analyse costs and create business rules and then Komprise will act automatically against those rules.”
Pfizer saved over 75% on storage and cloud migration costs with the Komprise solution. Cost savings came from removing manual data management and having Komprise intelligently and automatically move cold data from high-priced, on-premises storage to more cost-effective storage on Amazon S3. Pfizer can still directly access the data in AWS as S3 objects natively without lock-in or fees. Read the full case study here.
Conclusion
By 2025 90% of the data will be unstructured. Having an Intelligent data management solution will become business critical. With customers seeing a 70% reduction in storage costs, 27x faster data migration and 100% native access to cloud data now is the time to consider a solution.
Hopefully this blog gives you a good reason to consider an independent intelligent data management software solution as a part of your data management strategy.
Interested in finding out more? contact TD Synnex today.