Reshaping NAS for midrange efficiency

BANGALORE, INDIA: Data is big business in today’s market. With the right information, businesses can gain new market share, cement their current foundations, widen their reach and take advantage of new market opportunities quickly.

In short, the efficiency information storage infrastructure directly affects business’ competitiveness. Now with increasing scrutiny by regulators, rising cost of non-compliance and exploding growth of data, having a data infrastructure that is both scalable and intelligent is vital.

Also Read: Top Storage Trends for 2009: EMC

Managing unstructured data is now a key CXO concern. While most data infrastructures were structured data in mind, the proliferation of video, emails, pictures and business-related graphics as business assets has meant that managing them properly is a major business concern.

Consider a healthcare firm. It relies heavily on the proper storage of sensitive and important data as pictures, diagrams, X-ray photos etc. Storing these electronically not only saves on material costs, but also improves security, and privacy, while reducing misplacement and physical damage.

However, storing them properly and efficiently electronically can be a major challenge. As these are unstructured data, all the data need to be stored together unlike a relational database.

For a storage infrastructure not designed for unstructured data, this will lead to large swaps of space being underutilized, leading to a very low return on assets (RoA).

Relooking at NAS

So how to tackle these problems? The traditional answer has been deploying a network attached storage (NAS).

NAS provides a file-sharing network across many locations, unlike a storage area network (SAN) that provides a block-level storage network that is more centralized.

For many midsized organizations, NAS provides a more intuitive way to manage files across several offices or computers without rebuilding their entire storage infrastructure.

Despite its numerous advantages, NAS has traditionally posed four main problems. First is the complexity that is associated with managing storage across many locations and computers. Scalability and performance are others concerns, while the inability to manage unstructured data is becoming a liability.

All these have led to an increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO), a business concern especially after the recent financial downturn.

Hitachi Data Systems provides an alternative perspective with its Hitachi NAS 3080 and 3090. Besides providing numerous improvements that takes usability and reliability to the next level, the solutions introduce new features that will re-shape NAS, especially for cash-conscious and resource-strapped mid-sized organizations.

Space and speeds are two concerns that are now mandatory for good NAS solution. In today’s business world where data growth continues unabated and where tolerance for data access is almost minimal, having a solution that constantly pushes the envelope in performance, scalability, consolidation and management for midrange storage is vital.

Having such a solution is more than about having boasting rights of having better technical specification. It allows your business to quickly find the right information, while handling the sudden increases in storage needs and number of files.

For example, during winter when the influenza becomes a key issue, the system can rapidly scale up to meet the increase in the number of patient records for healthcare firms, being stored without degrading the overall performance in information retrieval.

At the same time, type of data should not matter. Whether it is unstructured or structured, data will need to be properly and securely managed and easily retrievable. Having a solution that is designed for all data types not only improves overall management, but allows you to centrally manage all data.

This is especially important in today’s data-driven world. With a single, integrated platform for all content types, these companies can easily manage large amounts of everyday content, from file, content to block, all from a single pane of management.

Adding tiering intelligence

One unique advantage that these new NAS offerings bring to the table that no other solution does is the idea of native intelligent file tiering.

Essentially, it allows you to move data automatically between high and low cost storage media. This simplifies management and balances performance with storage utilization. At the same time, you can easily conduct content searches across different information silos and even use the search results to automatically move data to the right media. 

From a business perspective, this can lower costs. In fact the new Hitachi NAS offerings can achieve up to 30 percent in TCO savings over competitive offerings. In today’s lean and thrifty business climate, this speaks volumes.

Another unique advantage lies in pricing. The new offerings do not expect you to invest hugely, a key concern for many mid-range organizations. Instead, you just pay for you really use, not what you think you will use. With a “pay-as-you-grow” option, you only pay when your demands or needs grow.

Undoubtedly, CXOs can easily understand its impact on budget planning and alignment of business goals and IT spending.

These new features provide a glimpse of how NAS will evolve to meet today’s and tomorrow’s concerns.

With better file tiering, improved TCO and better performance, offerings such as these attempt to rebalance the NAS equation and provide it as a viable alternative for mid-sized organizations to better manage their information and become efficient competitors in a highly-competitive global market.

The author is Director, Content & File Services, HDS Asia Pacific.