Most organizations have been dealing with fast data growth for a while. But we’re in a different place now than we were even five years ago.
Businesses today – maybe yours included – are dealing with a lot of unstructured data. It probably represents about 90% of all your data. Stuff like emails, texts, videos, audio, web pages, social media, and more. And it’s this data that’s growing really, really fast, close to three times as fast as structured data. 95% of businesses have issues with unstructured because, well, it’s unstructured. It’s non-uniform, hard to categorize and organize, and doesn’t fit neatly into columns and rows.
The Rising Adoption of Object Storage & Its Hidden Obstacles
Object storage scales massively, is relatively inexpensive, and is flexible enough to support all kinds of distributed, unstructured data – along with metadata for easier tracking, management, retrieval, and analysis. So not surprisingly, object storage is having a bit of a renaissance. It’s not just a cheap-and-deep bit-bucket for backup and archive. Its use cases now reach into life sciences, financial services (analytics), CCTV and rich media content delivery – even into big data and AI. This data fuels productivity, innovation, better customer relationships, and new revenue opportunities.
Yet, object storage hasn’t been very good at maintaining performance when your data sets get really large – like the multi-petabyte range that’s becoming common. Latency can explode when your scale-out clusters have dozens of nodes. And all that rich metadata spread across multiple nodes can cause additional performance lags. And despite its scale, object storage hasn’t been the best solution for consolidated workloads either. Yeah, some vendors have introduced multi-tenancy, but they haven’t figured out a way to guarantee both security and performance for each tenant – especially at scale.
The Cloud Storage Dilemma: High Latency & Costs
During Covid, many companies started moving to the cloud for more flexible storage operations. The curious thing is that many of them are now rethinking their move. For sure, cloud object storage helped tons of companies simplify their IT employees’ lives over the past few years. But those subscription fees and hefty data egress charges are starting to catch up with them now. We’re seeing companies repatriating some or all of their data.
But it’s not just cloud costs. It’s also the latency penalty you pay when moving data from the cloud to your on-prem apps. It has an impact on your overall performance and productivity.
DDN Infinia: Scaling Object Storage with Zero Compromises
DDN is a thoroughly modern, unique, and simple approach to managing unstructured and semi-structured data. Infinia is an innovative data platform that ushers object storage into the modern enterprise era – including the AI landscape. We’re talking about a multi-protocol solution with a unique software-defined approach that abstracts hardware complexity. It represents a simpler way of managing object storage and unstructured data at scale – one that doesn’t force you to compromise on performance, security, or resiliency.
With Infinia, you get built-in multi-tenancy with guaranteed performance for each workload – performance that’s up to 5 times faster than other solutions. You also get secure tenant isolation and scalability to hundreds of petabytes. So, there’s no trade-off between performance and capacity.
It’s designed to tackle the biggest obstacles with unstructured data and turn them to your advantage. With Infinia, you get a hyper-simple data repository that features:
- Intelligent automation
- Dynamic multi-petabyte scaling
- Breakthrough performance
- Guaranteed quality of service
- Secure multi-tenancy
- End-to-end data security
It really is the simplest, most intelligent solution for managing distributed, unstructured object data at scale.
How Infinia Transforms Object Storage Challenges into Opportunities
Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS): With Infinia, you can avoid the problems with other object and multi-tenant storage solutions that cause workloads to compete for resources and deliver unpredictable performance as they scale. Infinia features an Adaptive IO Engine that guarantees QoS for all object workloads. It allocates resources for incoming IO in real-time, with intelligent algorithms that optimize performance regardless of scale.
What if some of your tenants require high capacity and midrange performance while others require the opposite? And what about tenants that need both low latency and high throughput? Infinia’s Adaptive IO engine automatically optimizes object data placement and erasure coding based on incoming IO pattern and size. This minimizes your administrative burden by ensuring performance and protection across all tenants, for unstructured AND structured data types.
Unified multi-protocol support: DDN Infinia is designed to manage all your distributed data with minimal effort and cost. Its multi-protocol architecture can support your existing workloads without additional software or hardware. We’ve been talking about object storage, but what if you’re also using open source containers or block workloads? No worries. In addition to S3 object storage, Infinia uses CSI and Cinder frameworks to support Docker containers and Openstack virtual machines, respectively. It’s designed as a solution for modern data pipelines that bridge the gaps between app development and data science. This unified design protects the investments you’ve made in existing protocols. At the same time, you can eliminate multiple storage systems by consolidating data onto a single scalable multi-tenant system.
Cloud flexibility without the cost: Are you worried about spending (or are already spending) more than you expected on cloud object storage? You can deploy Infinia on-premises, with a flexible pay-as-you-model that avoids costly overprovisioning. This lets you repatriate your existing cloud workloads back on-prem and eliminate those heavy data egress charges. Of course, you still have the freedom to deploy Infinia in the public cloud or as an edge solution. In fact, Infinia can centrally orchestrate your distributed environments and simplify data coordination by 80% across on-prem, cloud, and edge deployments Plus, we’ve got a migration path in place in case you’ve already standardized on a customized Amazon S3 environment and are worried about moving data to a new system.
Strongest security foundation: As your enterprise data becomes increasingly distributed your risk of security breaches also increases. Infinia includes a set of military-grade security features specifically designed for multi-tenancy. To protect against unauthorized access, each tenant and subtenant has its own secured view of its data and subsystem. And unlike other solutions, your tenant services are securely isolated at multiple levels of granularity without forcing you to compromise on performance.
Innovate Your Data Approach: Experience Infinia in Action
If you’re serious about tackling your unstructured data and bringing some sanity back to your storage team, give us a shout and we’ll take you through a live demo. With Infinia you get a hyper-simple, highly intelligent object storage solution. You can cut your operating costs in half, and automatically meet all your tenant and workload-specific SLAs at any scale – without trade-offs, without compromises.
To learn more about Infinia, DDN’s groundbreaking software-defined solution for intelligent data management visit our Infinia page.
