06 June 2023

An essential infrastructure for the modern enterprise, storage is one pillar of the foundation upon which all business is built. Why then are so many enterprises stubbornly staying with outdated legacy systems? Amy Saunders asks the experts

The legacy storage conundrum

Thousands of businesses around the world still rely on legacy systems for data storage. While admittedly robust, legacy storage can cause big productivity dips, data loss and unnecessary downtime.

Some of the classic frustrations, according to Sergei Serdyuk, VP of product management, NAKIVO, include hardware and software limitations; poor performance; lack of scalability; limited accessibility; and cost.

Tony Hollingsbee, SSD business manager, EMEA at Kingston Technology, agrees: “the major drawback to the continued use of legacy technologies is the loss of performance and even data, by comparison with the reliability, security and high performance of modern storage drives.”

David Feller, vice president of product management and solutions engineering, Spectra Logic, meanwhile, says that the biggest frustration with legacy storage systems is compatibility with newer or more modern interfaces. “As more data centres leave fibre channel in favour of ethernet and SAS, storage devices need to follow suit to remain relevant. Likewise, as more and more organisations integrate cloud and cloud offerings, many legacy storage systems don’t support an S3 interface and object storage,” explains Feller.

Wes van den Berg, VP & GM, UK&I at Pure Storage, concurs that legacy architecture can’t keep up with modern workflows and the exponential growth of unstructured data, hampering innovation efforts. “Legacy storage architectures like disk-based systems have become a significant burden for enterprises. They are expensive to run, difficult to manage, power-hungry, can take up large amounts of space, and can also be unreliable, causing disruption and risking the stability of valuable data,” he says.
Indeed, legacy systems place a huge strain upon businesses in terms of skills, man-hours, and inefficiency. “While competitors are enjoying the agility, scalability, and accessibility of cloud-native solutions, maintaining your legacy system becomes harder and harder – and it’s dependent on employees that don’t benefit from it,” says Tim Hood, VP for EMEA & APAC, Hyland.

Is it time then, to look to the future for a modern, flexible solution?

“Replacing mechanical HDDs with SATA SSDs in a computer and/or server can be a game changer in terms of performance, allowing shorter system booting and application loading times, resulting in a more satisfactory user experience,” says Hollingsbee. “Transitioning to the latest generation of SSDs (PCIe NVMe), improves performance significantly, but due to the new interface and communication protocol on SSDS, this might require a bigger upfront investment in hardware.”

Serdyuk, too, believes that advanced storage solutions offer greater reliability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and accessibility for modern-day businesses: “for example, software-defined storage (SDS) allows for more flexible and scalable storage management, while all-flash arrays (AFAs) can provide high-performance storage. Cloud storage solutions also offer cost-effective scalability and flexibility while reducing the need for on-premises storage hardware.”

“Flash-based storage provides much higher speed and performance than legacy systems. Not only that, but flash is now available at a more economical price point than disk,” concurs van den Berg. “In addition, its physical footprint is significantly smaller - enabling enterprises to reduce data centre floor space and cut power consumption. As unstructured data growth continues, the need for a modern platform to provide a more sustainable and scalable storage solution for everyday workloads is evident.”

‘Just upgrade your storage’

“It sounds so easy… just upgrade your storage,” explains Feller. But when it comes down to it, “there are almost always larger forces at play,” continues Feller. “How is the data migrated? Was it written in a proprietary format? What does it mean for general workflow? Will users be able to access the new storage in the same way? These are the things that keep businesses on legacy systems past their useful life.”

Hood adds that, often, those operating legacy systems feel like they’ve hit an impasse. Removing a system that spans the entire business can feel like a seismic task – but failing to do so may allow competitors to accelerate away, and potentially alienate employees that had hoped for the ability to work remotely. “Similarly, you could risk discouraging new talent from joining – the majority of whom want to work for companies that utilise the latest technologies,” he adds.

As a result, many businesses try to compromise between legacy system and modern iterations by forcing their existing solution into a cloud environment via a patchwork infrastructure of compatible platforms and integrations – ‘cloud-enabled’ rather than ‘cloud-native.’

“This is a compromise: it compromises performance and business security, without properly solving the problems that the business faced in the beginning. Short-term fixes are seen as preferable to ripping off the metaphorical plaster, especially if creating stop-gap solutions is the norm,” asserts Hood.

Despite their decreasing effectiveness, businesses may hold on to legacy storage solutions for a variety of reasons, including cost, lack of expertise, data migration complications, and the big one: fear of change.

“Some businesses may be hesitant to adopt new storage solutions due to concerns that it would disrupt their routine workflows,” says Serdyuk. “This fear can be attributed to the learning curve associated with a new system or the possibility of unforeseen problems, such as compatibility issues. This can be particularly challenging for businesses that have been using their legacy systems for a long time and have become accustomed to them.”

Indeed, typically legacy systems have been in place for many years and businesses worry that migrating existing data to a new solution will cause disruption, “but this doesn’t have to be the case,” says van den Berg. “The move to modern flash-based storage systems actually reduces the chance of disruption as it provides better performance, scalability and reliability. Additionally, the legacy approach of ‘buy now; use for 3-5 years; then rip and replace’ ties customers into solutions which may not be suitable. There’s no flexibility in these legacy approaches and organisations should be demanding this from vendors so their needs are met, and they can scale up and down as needed.”

The impact of digital transformation

Digital transformation efforts have rapidly increased the volume of data generated, and hybrid working has accelerated this further. Data created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide is expected to reach 149Zb per year by 2024 - a 1,092% increase in the last decade.

“Such rapid data growth has significantly changed storage requirements; businesses need solutions that can cope with large volumes of unstructured data, scale easily and that can manage modern workflows,” says van den Berg.

Digital transformation is “one of the biggest impacts we’ve seen on modern storage, and it’s disappointing that more storage vendors haven’t addressed it,” comments Feller. “Data synchronisation becomes a big concern. There’s little advantage to building storage silos in multiple places. Storage in a hybrid environment should offer synchronisation between cloud and on-prem repositories or between multiple cloud repositories.”

Indeed, a successful hybrid workflow demands that data is accessible wherever it’s stored. “We traditionally think of on-prem and in the cloud, but a multi-cloud workflow is also considered hybrid,” says Feller. “We all know by now, it’s a lot easier to put your data in the cloud than it is to get it out. Egress charges tend to be excessively higher than storage charges. Moving between clouds or pulling data back to an on-prem location isn’t always financially viable. Storage for such situations must be able to address such issues as simple, free egress. Otherwise, we’re setting up organisations for a return to vendor lock-in.”

Hollingsbee agrees that with advancing and more sophisticated technologies, there is greater need for more accessible data. “The growth of data does not only exist in terms of volume but for cross-business need. A decade or so ago a lot of ‘cold’ storage would be stored on tape – but the advancement in data analysis means that companies are looking at historical data points and customer behaviours to give real insights in how they can gain a competitive edge and improve operations.”

Does (enterprise) size matter?

Across all enterprise types and sizes, storage is a vital element of the business strategy. Adequate storage, from a capacity and performance perspective, is essential for providing reliable and responsive access to information.

“The bigger the company, the more data it is likely to generate and that means a greater demand for storage and archiving facilities,” says Hollingsbee. “What the data is used for is also significant. We see organisations that utilise data across hundreds of applications even when they have a small head count. It comes down to data utilisation and what they are bringing to market.”

Indeed, as organisations grow, they tend to generate and store more data, which can lead to a more complex IT infrastructure involving multiple storage systems, various applications, and numerous user devices.

“To meet these storage needs, enterprises must have enough capacity and better management of storage systems. The specific storage requirements vary across organisations, depending on their workload and priorities. For instance, some enterprises may need high-speed flash storage for real-time data processing, while others prioritise low latency for applications like high-frequency trading,” explains Serdyuk. “Additionally, certain companies may prefer NAS or SAN solutions for specific tasks such as video editing.”

van den Berg agrees that the larger an enterprise, the more data it will create, so bigger enterprises have more significant storage needs. “However, for all organisations, storage needs are increasing as data volume grows. Businesses need an infrastructure that can not only deliver in high-performance and low latency, but that can scale alongside them. That’s why we’re seeing the increasing popularity of subscription-based storage which provides businesses with the flexibility to easily scale up data storage as and when needed, while also delivering the performance and security of modern storage solutions.”

Disagreeing with his fellow storage experts, Feller asserts that “quite frankly, it (size) doesn’t (matter). There are very small organisations that produce petabytes of data and very large organisations that aren’t data intensive at all. It’s the amount of data an organisation holds and the amount of time they hold it that really impacts storage needs.”