04 November 2024

When it comes to storing enterprise data, the most important deciding factor varies widely from company to company…

Data volumes are notoriously booming across the world – current estimates say that today, some 402.74 million terabytes (or 0.4 zettabytes) of data are generated each day. Statista suggests that by 2025, more than 180 zettabytes of data will be generated daily, while the IDC has a similar forecast of 175 zettabytes per day in the same timeframe. Clearly, data is a big, booming business – so how will the UK’s enterprises manage?

Is bigger always better?
When it comes to enterprise data storage, it’s arguable whether bigger is always better. While large storage capacities are important in many cases, there are several factors beyond sheer volume that organisations need to consider for an optimal storage solution.

“While having ample storage capacity is important, bigger isn’t always better,” says Judy Kaldenberg, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nexsan. “The key is to balance capacity with performance, scalability and efficiency. Enterprises must consider how their data grows and changes, ensuring that their storage solutions can adapt accordingly. It’s more about having the right storage solution that matches your needs rather than just opting for the largest capacity available.”

“The more data you have, the more you can potentially draw value from – but the real power lies in how effectively that data is managed and utilised. Bigger isn’t always better,” agrees Tim Hood, VP of EMEA & APAC, Hyland Solutions. “Larger storage can unnecessarily ramp up storage costs, elongate processing times, and increase the risk of silos fragmenting useful information.”

It’s important to highlight that bigger does not necessarily equate to better performance, and that high-speed, low-latency access is crucial for many enterprise applications. Instead, enterprises should scale smart, not big: hybrid solutions offer the best of both worlds by balancing on-premise storage for critical workloads and cloud for scalable, less-critical data.

Rainer W. Kaese, Senior Manager Business Development Storage Products at Toshiba Electronics Europe, however, disagrees: “bigger is always better. Data to be stored is exploding, data is the fuel of the AI age. Nevertheless, there are secondary attributes which should not be neglected.”

These include:

• Cost (per capacity): With the exploding need for storage capacity, the cost of storage plays an important role.
• Performance: HDDs are slower than flash memory-based storage. For high performance storages, flash memory-based storage may be the better option. However, for large online storage, companies would need systems with up to hundreds of HDDs; such a system, appropriately optimised, can combine the power of many (slow and cheap) HDDs into a performance that matches systems with few (fast but costly) SSDs – at a fraction of the cost per capacity.
• Power consumption and data centre footprint: Here, HDD based storage for large capacities in the PB range remain competitive/comparable to alternative technologies. Flash memory-based solutions offer significantly lower size/footprint and slightly lower power consumption - but the difference in cost would take dozens of years to amortise.

Empowering the enterprise
The type of storage that truly empowers businesses for data storage, processing, and utilisation varies depending on specific needs - but hybrid, flexible, and intelligent storage solutions offer the most comprehensive value.

“The ideal storage solution for businesses is one that offers a blend of scalability, performance and manageability,” says Kaldenberg. “Solutions that leverage technologies like hybrid storage arrays, which combine flash and traditional spinning disks, often provide the best balance. They offer the speed and efficiency of flash for high-performance applications while maintaining the cost-effectiveness of disk storage for larger volumes of data. Additionally, intelligent data management features, such as robust data protection, are crucial for maximising security of data.”

“Types of storage that can be accessed across the hybrid multi-cloud are giving firms far more options when it comes to placement of data, workloads and applications,” agrees Mark Molyneux, EMEA CTO at Cohesity. “The old days of picking a monolithic storage array to store your data have drastically changed now, as firms are catering for many landing-zones depending on the requirements of their disparate businesses. Those firms ‘born in the cloud’ will naturally focus on cloud-provided storage technologies, but what if you are a well-established player with your own data centres and a variety of technologies, from new to heritage? You are likely meeting requirements for on-premise, for private cloud, and for public cloud, so selecting the storage mediums that are right for your business is critical. Whatever you choose to deploy, you need to ensure they feature the latest capabilities both technically and from a security perspective.”

Enterprises can utilise smarter storage methods to make the most of their data by adopting technologies and strategies that enhance data access, management, processing, and utilisation. These methods go beyond simply storing data and focus instead on optimising how data is used to drive business insights, operational efficiency, and innovation.

Smart Tiering - the ability to place data correctly in accordance with a relevant record strategy, and with business requirements in mind – offers game-changing results to businesses. It controls the placement of data on primary storage which ensures the most expensive storage is only being used for the right purposes, while assisting in sustainability goals, day-to-day capacity management which aids future financial outlay.

“This also ensures you know exactly what data is where at any time, thereby controlling the often out-of-control secondary data mountain,” explains Molyneux. “Organisations should consolidate their disparate application data silos into a single centralised data management platform that is based on a scalable hyper converged file system. In this case, the data stored will be automatically analysed by the deduplication and compression functions to achieve the highest reduction rates across the organisation.”

Data reduction techniques, too, with compression and deduplication, have a role to play, enabling businesses to make better use of existing storage.
“Data reduction can massively help companies to store data more cost-effectively, since these mechanisms automatically reduce the amount of secondary data in the background as soon as it is generated, without anyone having to actively initiate the process,” says Molyneux. “This pays off immediately when you take a close look at the costs. Although hardware is generally becoming cheaper because the disks provide more storage per euro, the operating costs drive the price up. According to an analysis by Nasuni, it costs $3,351 a year to store one TB of file data. Existing storage resources are protected by data reduction, so that investments in new storage resources can be postponed.”

One size fits all?
When selecting storage, each individual enterprise must closely consider its specific business needs and use cases. Storage solutions should directly support the performance, scalability, data management, security, and cost requirements of the enterprise’s current and future workloads.
But what’s the single most important deciding factor? According to Kaese, it comes down to cost per capacity…

In contrast, Kaldenberg believes that immutability is the most critical factor – and one that is often overlooked: “data can be stored as immutable with WORM data storage or as an immutable data backup. Immutable backups have become increasingly important as malicious cyberattacks target backups as they ensure that your critical data remains tamper-proof. By implementing immutable backup storage, businesses can safeguard their most valuable data, providing peace of mind that backup integrity is never compromised.”

Security is the most critical factor firms must consider when choosing the right storage technology, both from a protection/defence and recovery standpoint, as well as a compliance perspective, asserts Molyneux: “even if a platform offers the best performance at the lowest cost, weak security — like a ‘Swiss cheese’ full of holes — renders it a poor investment. Inadequate security not only wastes money but also exposes the business to far greater risks, including brand damage, loss of customer trust and confidence and costly regulatory fines.”

“The type of storage that truly empowers businesses for data storage, processing, and utilisation varies depending on specific needs - but hybrid, flexible, and intelligent storage solutions offer the most comprehensive value.”

Meanwhile, “as businesses grow and data volumes continue to surge, it’s incredibly important that storage can scale efficiently with them – without compromising performance, accessibility, or security,” opines Hood. “Without scalable solutions, businesses are capped as to just how far they can grow without compromising themselves in some way, whether they’re wrestling with newly applicable regulations, a simple increase in data volumes, or more complex workflows. Scalable solutions also provide the flexibility to integrate emerging AI and automation technologies, which become more of a non-negotiable as each day passes – particularly in insurance and financial services. The capacity to adapt and expand ensures that data remains an asset, not a burden, as your business evolves.”

Clearly, not only is storage not ‘one size fits all,’ neither is there a single most important factor in picking the right technology. Indeed, the ‘right’ storage depends on how well it fits the organisation’s specific business needs — whether that’s high-performance data processing, vast scalability, cost efficiency, compliance, or a combination of these.

Long-haul future-proofing

To future-proof storage for the long term, enterprises must adopt strategies and technologies that ensure flexibility, scalability, and adaptability.

“If data is the fuel of the new era, make sure you always have enough capacity to store the fuel,” advises Kaese. “And make sure you can expand as you go. Data creation will not stop. If data creation continues and there is no space to store, valuable fuel will be lost. Hence, it’s important to secure continuous storage expansion, as well as the safe and reliable maintenance of existing storage.”

Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy, combining the scalability of cloud storage with the performance and control of on-premise infrastructure, offers flexibility for future growth. With such a strategy, critical, latency-sensitive data can be stored on-premise or in private clouds for optimal performance; while public cloud storage can be used for less critical, long-term, or archival data - and which can scale as data volumes grow.

“To truly future-proof their storage, enterprises need to focus on cloud-native, scalable solutions that offer flexibility, security, and seamless integration,” confirms Hood. “With data privacy regulations becoming more complex, such a solution can offer a dramatically streamlined approach to information security, with cybersecurity and compliance updates entirely automated by a provider.”

“Organisations should choose solutions that can grow with their data needs and data protection goals,” agrees Kaldenberg. “By opting for technologies that support a variety of data types and workloads, they are better positioned to adapt to new technologies and standards easily. Additionally, implementing unified storage systems enables efficient management of both block and file storage within a single platform, enhancing flexibility and performance.”

Of course, every enterprise must also consider investing in robust data security and compliance to address new threats and evolving regulations; ensuring that storage solutions are equipped to handle long-term needs.

“Enterprises should adopt a comprehensive strategy built on zero trust principles and prioritise data resiliency,” says Molyneux. “By embedding fault tolerance through redundancy, companies can eliminate single points of failure, which enhances the longevity of storage systems. Critical data should be protected through immutability and configurable persistence, safeguarding it from ransomware attacks and ensuring that its confidentiality and integrity are maintained over time.”

Future-proofing enterprise storage requires adopting scalable, flexible, and secure storage solutions that can adapt to evolving data demands and technological advancements. By regularly reviewing and updating the storage strategy, enterprises can maintain alignment with business goals and technological progress. n