IIIS: Massive data sets need to be stored efficiently and online 24/7, says HP

HP is focusing on delivering scale-out solutions for users to implement in their datacentres to handle the current significant amount of growth of unstructured data, according to its storage works sales and category manager A/NZ, Mark Nielsen.

He was speaking at a ‘visions’ session on managing the growth of unstructured data at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium (IIIS) 2011 in Sydney.

The aim of the session was to show market trends within the datacentre environment, its implications on the IT industry and the benefits of moving from a traditional approach to the scale-out NAS type of solutions. According to Nielsen, the importance of efficiently storing massive data sets and making them available 24/7 had led to the requirement for a new way of storage, managing and protecting that information.

“If you look at the Web today, everything is video based and the content is huge in the marketplace. If you look at Snapfish for instance, in 2008, there was 6PB in terms of storage, 15PB in 2009 and today, it stands at about 30PB to deliver all that content out on the Web,” he said.

Organisations will spend about $16.4 billion on storage solutions to store documents, images, videos, etc. this year, Nielsen said. This translates to 17,300PB of new disk capacity that is being deployed within datacentres today.

“By 2014, this will escalate to $22.5 billion – about 67,145PB in terms of capacity,” he added. Nielsen described a traditional scale-up approach as one that has a complex management, inefficient use of storage assets, increased cost of ownership and inefficient backup types.

Using a traditional scale-up approach and the growth of unstructured data pose challenges in terms of scalability and manageability.

He offered four problems of unstructured data, which include:

1. Storage must constantly gro
2. Storage performance stifles productivity
3. Migrating data form one system to another
4. Multiple systems of infrastructure silos for file and block

Nielsen suggested businesses implement smart tiering, scale-out NAS online, load balanced performance, automate data movement and implement a single device for block and file as some solutions to counter the challenges.

“It’s just not efficient to be able to deploy multiple silos of Scale-up type solutions and those sorts of architectures and be able to manage them effectively. Scale-out NAS is the best way of doing that,” he concluded.

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