Evaluating Storage Products for Your Enterprise Needs

For IT departments, evaluating storage products is an important process that can determine the entire shape of a company’s digital infrastructure. A poorly architected storage solution can substantially impair a department’s performance and lead to major outages or in worst case scenarios, permanent data loss. However, an intelligent decision, made with the right factors in mind, can provide an organization with a scalable shared storage solution that is able to meet the performance and reliability service level objectives of the proposed system design.

Especially on a larger scale, maintaining IT architecture can be like keeping an old car operational. It’s expensive and resource-intensive if you don’t have the time or money to source a better alternative. IT sysadmins working with antiquated and inefficient hardware can struggle to catch up and support data transformation initiatives.

Enterprise Data Requirements

Understanding the block, file, and object requirement

When onboarding new applications, it’s important to understand the kind of data being stored to make an informed decision on whether to use block, file or object storage.

Block storage is the most common use case for DAS and SAN environments. In the case of DAS, an entire RAID volume or Physical Drive is presented to the OS as a raw, unformatted volume. In the case of SAN environments, the entire LUN (compromised of several physical drives) presented from the storage array is presented to the OS through a high-speed network and appears as a raw unformatted volume. The underlying layers of the raw volume consists of smaller extents or sectors that the operating system handles and then the underlying storage subsystem is able to map those logical blocks to specific physical blocks on the specific drive(s). Block level storage is fast, reliable and most ideal for continuously changing data like relational databases, online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, email servers or virtual desktop infrastructure, where high transaction throughput and low latency is a requirement.

Object storage stores data (and metadata associated with it) in containers with unique identifiers, with no folders or subdirectories like those associated with file storage. They use the concept of key-value stores, where each key point to a specific “value” or piece of data and is retrieved via APIs.

It is mainly used to handle large amounts of unstructured data, like emails, backup images, video surveillance footage or, in IoT, data management for machine learning and data analytics. Object storage is good for handling very large amounts of data and can scale as quickly as the application requires but is slow at data retrieval, making it inefficient for databases or high-performance computing. Examples of object storage are Amazon S3, Google Cloud object storage, or Azure Blob storage.

File storage stores data in files, organized in folders and subdirectories, and is shared over a network using SMB (Windows) or NFS (Linux). It’s good for centralizing storage files like videos, images or documents but it has limited scalability as the amount of data continues to grow. It is not the most suitable application to handle very large amounts of unstructured data or continuously changing data like OLTP databases.

Support for Storage Products

A great product can be sadly undermined by a lacking support team to help an enterprise manage any issues they have during its use. Conversely, a good product can be raised to new heights by the exceptional efforts of its technical support staff. It may be worth accounting for your existing professional relationship with your enterprise’s incumbent storage vendor when making a decision regarding a potential change in your storage solution. Additionally, any service level agreements (SLAs) such as meeting KPIs like latency, throughput, or IOPS during specific workloads should impact your choice. If your intended vendor has a strong reputation in the industry (for example, they generally exceed the industry standard benchmarks), you can take them at their word when they advertise features such as high IOPS and throughput at acceptable latency for each platform.

Another element to keep in mind is the cost of any storage products you’re considering. Not only the cost of acquisition, but the cost of maintenance and total cost of ownership (TCO) should be accounted for.

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