As the environments become increasingly common, IT needs to eliminate analytics storage silos. These use cases place extreme pressure on storage and compute resources to keep pace with the applications doing the processing. Many storage systems are custom-designed for analytics use cases. As a result, the organization ends up buying a separate solution, which not only complicates an already complex storage infrastructure; it also accelerates out of control storage costs.
The requirement of a specialized storage infrastructure just for analytics processing severely limits the number of organizations that can justify an investment in these applications. Most organizations can’t afford a stand-alone system just for analytics purposes. If the company does decide to invest in a solution just for analytics, they are increasing the cost of not only their storage infrastructure but also the cost to operate and maintain that environment.
Software is the Reason for Storage Silos
Organizations need a storage solution that can handle the demands of high-performance analytics. At the same time, it needs to support the more mainstream requirements of environments like VMware, Oracle, and MS-SQL. The problem when trying to eliminate analytics storage silos is most storage solutions on the market today can’t satisfy both use cases, despite the fact that the hardware in these systems indicates they should. If IT calculates the raw performance of the storage hardware, most systems should generate well over one million IOPS. The unfortunate reality is they don’t even come close. Most storage systems only deliver 10% to 20% of the potential of the hardware.
The problem is storage software. It is inefficient at its core, and every feature vendors add only exacerbates the inefficiency. To compensate, most vendors push even more hardware resources into their storage systems, like more powerful CPUs, maximum RAM, and proprietary ASICS or FPGAs. All of these additions add to cost and explain why analytics specific solution emerges.
Storage software is inefficient because most storage vendors take the fast path to market. They use existing algorithms and code bases instead of developing them from scratch. The result is inefficiency and an eventual slow down in development pace.
As mentioned in, “Why is Software Defined Storage Failing to Consolidate Storage?” inefficient storage software is why software-defined storage (SDS) failed. SDS only extracts storage software from storage hardware. It didn’t address the fundamental issue of inefficiency.
Optimizing Software to Eliminate Analytics Storage Silos
Storage hardware (servers, networking, and media) has the raw potential to eliminate analytics storage silos. IT needs to find storage software to work with that hardware to its full potential. The storage software solution needs to support mainstream and high-performance analytics workloads simultaneously. The ability to consolidate these two workloads brings down storage infrastructure costs across the board. It also simplifies management.
Storage software vendors need to stop leveraging existing code and algorithms written for the hard disk media and single-core processor era. Vendors need to take the time to rewrite storage software from scratch and refactor legacy algorithms. It may take longer to create a solution, and they may not be able to go to market as fast. Vendors may find that after they complete the initial development, they can add new capabilities very quickly.
Eliminate the Data Analytics Storage Silo with StorONE
At StorONE, efficiency is at our core. We won’t add features to our Enterprise Storage Platform until we can make sure they won’t negatively impact efficiency. Our commitment to efficiency means that we can deliver maximum performance from minimal hardware. We have customers using prior generation servers with our software to extract hundreds of thousands of IOPS. Because we took the time to establish a strong foundation for our Storage Platform, we can adhere to a quarterly release cycle, with significant new capabilities, unheard of in the storage industry.
Efficiency in Action
Our customer, SQream, is an excellent example of a company using our software to eliminate the data analytics storage silo. They use our solution to address a very performance demanding environment, while also using it for more general-purpose use cases because of its cost-effectiveness. We recently completed an on-demand webinar with SQream and discussed their use of the solution. We also have a white-paper available that details the solution.
The value of our Enterprise Storage Platform is you really can have it all. S1 delivers high performance to the most demanding applications while also being affordable so that mainstream environments like VMware and Hyper-V can use it. You also don’t have to compromise on features. S1 provides unmatched protection from media failure, unlimited snapshots, and replication to protect against data center failure.
The best way to see our solution in action is to have our team take you through a live demo while you ask questions. See high-performance, mixed workloads, and maximum data protection all from a single solution. Sign up here, and we’ll have one of our Engineers walk you through our solution in real-time.
