We are living in an ever-present, data-driven economy. Connected devices and IoT are driving up the collection and distribution of data and creating capacity and management challenges like never before. Not only does the data need to be securely stored, it needs to be available within seconds and 24/7. CIOs and IT directors must identify and face these data management challenges with an efficient, scalable and customizable solution.
Let’s identify these challenges and key questions IT leaders must face to uncover a powerful answer to the enormous influx of data growth.
Platform Scalability and Customization
In 2017, The Economist declared data as the world’s most valuable resource, over oil. With the rise of smartphones and the use of the internet in our daily lives, data has become a valued resource for governments and businesses alike. Every prediction of new future-forward technology involves the collection, dissemination and long-term storage of data, no matter the size of the organization.
The Questions: How can a business effectively store the growth of such a valuable resource? What about legacy systems already in use for storage?
A robust platform is required that can be scaled and customized for both small-to-medium business and enterprise growth. The storage scalability, including upgrades and technology refreshes, must also be seamless and non-disruptive to be a competent solution to this challenge.
The Answer: NEC’s HYDRAstor easily handles the data needs and growth of SMB and enterprise businesses, scaling from 1 to 165 nodes, and managing petabytes of data through compression and deduplication. Upgrades are non-disruptive with the ability to add up to 3 generations of hardware, simultaneously in the same system. The grid architecture features two different node types: hybrids (HN) for expanding both performance and capacity or storage (SN) for expanding capacity only. Data deduplication is distributed globally, across all nodes, and resources required for more power and more capacity are aggregated through the grid. Depending on the needs of the organization, the platform can be configured as required for near unlimited data growth.
Backup Performance, No Failures and No Disruption of Service – NEC/Segue Case Study:
Data Reliability, Availability and Protection
Healthcare organizations rely on accurate data to make life or death decisions for patients. Autonomous vehicles rely on data access to operate safely. Digital financial transactions are monitored for criminal activity and must be available almost instantly. With these and other organizational shifts to the cloud, data must be easily accessible, dependable and secure.
The Questions: Can data be both accessible and secure? Is there a high availability solution that can handle inevitable disk failures or other data disruptions?
The Answer: With no single point of failure, NEC’s HYDRAstor grid architecture offers advanced data protection with erasure-coded resilience. Erasure coding involves distributing the data across the entire storage grid, tolerating up to six concurrent disk or node failures with no disruption. Data resiliency is ensured by the automatic rebuilding of only the lost data, enabling a faster data rebuild than traditional RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).
HYDRAstor offers data encryption prior to being written to disk, securing it from unauthorized access to lost or stolen disks. Classified and unclassified data can also exist within the same node, boosted by HYDRAstor’s Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) capability and data-shredding for regulatory compliance.
Legal Services Company Turns to NEC:
Simplification of Management
Data migrations are a common pain point among IT departments. Managing a complex data storage solution can be convoluted, especially with the challenge of fork lift upgrade of legacy systems and disparate data backups.
The Questions: How can a storage solution be introduced into an existing environment and still be simple to manage? Is there a need to replace the current systems and software already in place?
The Answer: NEC’s HYDRAstor offers simplified intelligence management software and works with existing backup applications such as Net Backup, Veritas, Veeam, Commvault and more. The system dynamically allocates storage capacity as needed, without user intervention or configuration, through auto provisioning. It also provides a simple, non-disruptive ability to replace legacy hardware and add additional capacity without interruption of data access.
NEC’s Data Storage Partners:
NEC’s HYDRAstor: A Cost-efficient Solution for Data Growth
In 2013, Science Daily predicted that 90% of the data in the world had been generated in the previous two years. Many predict that data will continue to grow exponentially as far into the future as we can imagine. CIOs of small, medium and large organizations must be prepared for the long-term storage and backup of this data, but are understandably concerned about the costs.
The BIG Question: Can a storage platform be all this and cost efficient too?
The Answer: NEC’s HYDRAstor storage platform is well-equipped to handle these data challenges and help create cost-efficiencies in the process.
– Replication to and from disaster recovery sites with encrypted and deduplicated streams ensures data is safe everywhere, is stored cost-effectively, and is moved as fast as possible between sites.
– Storage capacity consumption is reduced through inline global deduplication offering near unlimited storage for data growth.
– For small-to-medium businesses, HYDRAstor is available on virtual appliances using VMWare ESXi or Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
– For enterprise organizations, HYDRAstor can be built out from one to 165 nodes, reaching up to six petabytes of throughput per hour.
– HYDRAstor supports all main backup software vendors and multiple generations of hardware, reducing the need for rip and replace or forklift upgrades.
– Grid architecture and erasure coding distributes data across all nodes for no disruptions in the case of disk or node failures.
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