If data is the oil of the digital economy, then it’s impossible to imagine the development of a business that operates with big data without the appropriate infrastructure. How can small and medium-sized businesses choose the optimal data storage system for their needs?
Growth Trend
The data storage system is a critical area of infrastructure modernization, necessary to increase IT capacity in every sector of today’s economy.
Investments in high-performance systems (flash drives) are on the rise: their share increased in the last quarter, although HDD-based systems still dominate the market. Mid-range systems, on the other hand, continue to be the leading platform. All in all, investing in storage upgrades is a global trend, and one of the symptoms of digital-centric business models’ growth. The collection and storage of large amounts of corporate information play a critical role in DSS development.
Price Impact
What determines the final choice in favor of a particular data storage solution? As usual, it all starts with the classic characteristics: price, functionality, and quality. Let’s take a closer look at the first point.
If we are talking about a storage system’s price, it’s worth considering the initial cost a company pays for its purchase. The second point is the price of further scaling and operation. Altogether these components form the price of owning a data storage system throughout its entire life. The first element is quite a specific characteristic, which can also be reduced through various tender procedures, but the second is a bit more complicated.
Today, SMB companies don’t need to consider challenging high-end solutions. Yes, they are incredibly productive and reliable, but it’s not economically feasible for medium-sized businesses to strive for premium systems. This is primarily due to the development of different SDS formats (software-defined storage), which have a reasonably comprehensive functionality with low requirements to the equipment’s characteristics. On the other hand, the disks themselves are also improving, providing a significant performance level for a relatively small amount of money. So far, high-end solutions have not provided for anything that a typical mid-range storage or SDS solutions could not.
Top Vendors And the Traps They Set
There is another danger: many low-cost solutions on the market tempt the customer to save money. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of, you know, choosing a low price and making a mistake regarding the manufacturer.
The most common situation that happens is a failure in your DSS. Sooner or later, some elements in any system will fail, and this is normal. However, if you choose a low-cost solution or a custom system tailored to your business, you will encounter a lack of customer support. It happens because such solutions initially are not focused on business: there is no 24/7/365 operation mode and no equipment replacement on the next working day.
On the other hand, A and B class vendors have competence centers in their headquarters and a network of authorized partners across the sales loop. They fully understand customer issues and problems, and their support is initially targeted at getting their storage systems up and running as fast as possible.
However, it’s not that simple. Despite the undeniable advantages, the top vendors, especially the market leaders, often use a vendor lock-in model of hardware compatibility. If you need to replace the failed disk or scale up the system, it can be done only with the same vendor’s components and at a much higher price.
Every additional shelf, every disk, and every capacity increase costs a lot of money. And unlike the first purchase, this price cannot be lowered by standard bidding procedures because you have no alternative. So, from the perspective of scaling and operation, you need to pay attention to the fact that the storage system can use third-party components or at least disks.
SDS in Future
One of the ways to avoid typical problems is to choose SDS solutions. All software-defined storage systems can be divided into three classes based on functionality:
- SDS is essentially the same hardware-based storage systems, based on a scale-up architecture, which means they are vertically scalable. For example, Aerodisk Engine or NexentaStor are supplied as software and installed on compatible equipment chosen by the customer. Today, these storage systems are becoming increasingly popular, as they solve the same problems as classical hardware systems but are more flexible and require less investment in scaling.
- Horizontal scalability solutions. They don’t have the classic division of the controller and disk shelves. Accordingly, they may have 4, 8, 10 controllers, etc. Today, they are the most widespread solutions in the SDS sphere, but as a rule, they are rarely used by small and medium-sized businesses due to their high complexity.
Although scale-out SDS solutions are not widespread in SMB, a separate class – Hyper-converged infrastructure was born on their basis. Such solutions (e.g., Aerodisk vAir, Cisco Hyperflex, Nutanix, VMware vSan) work on the “data center in a box” principle and combine scale-out storage, software-defined network, and hypervisor to run virtual machines. Such systems are manageable, can be scaled horizontally, and can be delivered as software installed on compatible third-party hardware. Meanwhile, many vendors in this segment have offerings for SMBs.
- The direction of SDS Orchestration is not entirely developed yet, but it’s already gaining popularity. This is a system of automatic storage management: the software is installed in the company’s infrastructure, and absolutely different storage systems are connected to it. Then standard file or object protocols create storage pools, and a single system under the control of the Orchestration is provided to the external customer. So far, this type of SDS is represented either in the form of expensive solutions from huge manufacturers or open-source solutions. However, any system administrator will consolidate all corporate data storage systems into a single transparent and easy-to-manage system in two or three years, according to the tendencies.
