Storage vendors pitch new systems in innumerable ways. Whether they tout performance claims about IOPS and low latency, protection, reliability, and security features or sell on convenience, capacity, cost, or even brand reputation, there are many options vendors can offer an IT team looking to fix a problem.
Although these various abilities have been around for many years, they have long been confined to a storage-centric ecosystem. With the advent of advanced data management software, it finally becomes possible to shift to a data-centric architecture that enables IT admins to automatically align data with storage that meets enterprises’ business objectives.
The roots of the proverb “what gets measured gets managed” can interestingly be traced back to Lord Kelvin, father of the laws of thermodynamics and physics. This wisdom holds true today in the modern data center. From flash, cloud and shared storage, the various resources that architects choose for their infrastructure generally offer quantifiable amounts of performance, capacity, and even networking and are often purchased and managed according to the the boundaries of the specific product.
Traditionally, since the pain of data migrations means a storage resource will serve an application throughout its lifetime, IT is forced to choose a resource that can meet expected peak performance and capacity needs. This one-size-fits-all approach keeps applications safe, but it results in significant waste at most enterprises, as well as misalignment between storage capabilities and actual data demands. Hot data that becomes cold takes up valuable capacity on performance storage, forcing IT to keep spending their way out of performance problems.
This inefficiency points to the limitations of the enterprise technology legacy we’ve inherited from generations past. Since the early days of enterprise computing, there has been an architecturally rigid relationship between applications and storage, which is the root cause of the inefficiency in storage today. But it doesn’t have to be this way any longer.
