Today's data platforms are not fit for the future, says Scality

Richard Feltham, sales director at Scality, says traditional data storage isn’t designed to handle today’s petabyte-scale, always-on, global cloud, edge-connected world

Today's data platform's are not fit the future, and are struggling with the needs of the present.

That's the view of Richard Feltham, sales director at Scality, speaking at Computing's recent Deskflix event on data mobility.

"For nearly all companies today your data holds the power to transform your business," Feltham began. "You can harness the full potential of data through new services to new uses."

He continued: "Unstructured data is the new norm. Data is now created everywhere. Massive volumes are created in the enterprise, the cloud, and also at the edge. It's not unusual for companies of all types to manage multiple petabytes of data."

He explained that most of this growth is in unstructured data, which has no existing or pre-defined model describing its organisation. Examples include videos, pictures, text, emails, audio files, and more.

"Most of the growth is in unstructured data. At large scale data becomes much more difficult to store, protect and keep available. And it's especially challenging at a cost that businesses can afford today. The costs are in both in the technologies required to store and manage data at scale, but also in the skills and resources needed to operate them."

In Feltham's view, storage is fundamental to the business, and is about more than simply storing information.

"Storage needs to be more than a tool to store data. It needs to become a strategic platform. This means data needs to be on a platform that can protect it, make it easily accessible all the time to users, and empower them to extract its value.

"This data platform needs to evolve over time so it can continuously provide better efficiency in cost, people and service delivery.

"Traditional data storage isn't designed to handle this new world of petabyte-scale, always-on, global cloud, edge-connected data. That puts a new demand on your people and your technology infrastructure.

"Much of your storage administrator's time today is spent juggling data across multiple platforms and silos, keeping data securely available 24/7 to multiple applications, managing data as it spans from on-premise to public clouds and the edge, and managing so much data that it becomes cost prohibitive to store, forcing a choice between what data is maintained, and what is not."

The answer, he said, is in new software-defined storage architectures.

"Todays' data platforms need to fundamentally change. A data platform needs to provide scalability but be agile at the same time. This begins with new software-based data storage infrastructures that can provide the following four key capabilities:

• Unlimited scale in terms of capacity and performance but also support legacy and cloud-native applications.
• Data durability at highest levels to ensure data can live long-terms at the highest integrity.
• Provide architectures that enable freedom of choice and future-proof your deployed platforms.
• Support for geo-distribution and cloud technologies that enable data mobility between on-premises and the public cloud with any type of data and workload.

"Ultimately the data platform needs to be simple, flexible, and be affordable."

Computing's next Deskflix virtual event will be on Cyber Security, broadcast live on the 18th June.