There is a veritable food court of storage technologies on the market. How do you go about finding the solution that’s a good fit for your organization? In my earlier blogs I talked about hyper-convergence, open source storage, software-defined storage Cloud storage, flash storage, and object storage. To make the process of understanding storage technologies a bit easier, I’ve listed the major technologies and included the pros and cons of each.
| Storage Technology | Pros | Cons |
|---|
| Software-defined storage | - Automate and manage data from a centralized location.
- Build your own storage infrastructure, so you don’t have to worry about integrating different vendor products.
- Flexible scaling allows you to add new features with just software updates.
| - Independent software and hardware means more components to manage.
- Must ensure that the infrastructure matches the difference in latency and performance across your storage arrays.
|
| Integrated computing platform (ICP), or hyper-convergence | - Simplifies storage, computing, and network management.
- Computer, storage, and network comes as a complete package.
- Good package for a moderate IT budget.
| - Making granular upgrades or minor tweaks is challenging. For example, if the cluster gets low on storage, but the computer is performing well, a storage upgrade alone is not possible.
- Must upgrade overall capability by adding another appliance when the cluster runs low on storage, even if the rest of the system is operating well.
|
| Open source storage | - Save money on purchase and maintenance.
- No compliance issues.
- Code modification is based on your organization’s needs.
| - Hidden costs are involved, especially the cost of hiring a trained admin who knows how to operate the system, or training a current admin to do so.
- Must be compatible with other platforms in your organization.
- No technical guidance or customer support. You are on your own if something fails.
|
| Cloud storage | - Minimal initial investment.
- Makes data available for users everywhere. Some availability outside the company VPN.
- Multiple disaster recovery options keep data safe.
| - You are charged according to the amount of storage you use. This can be expensive, but beneficial at times for some organizations because they don’t have to pay ahead.
- The security of your data depends on your 3rd parties.
- Because the bulk of your data has to be transferred via the Internet, you will pay more for the bandwidth you use.
|
| Flash storage | - Able to continually increase capacity.
- No moving parts (i.e. spinning disks) to create opportunities for storage mishandling.
| - More expensive than hard drives at a dollar per GB level.
- Performance across vendors and models can vary significantly, even for the same capacity and endurance rating.
|
| Object storage | - Best solution for backup and recovery options.
- Good scalability and distributed access.
| - Data is unstructured.
- Not suited for organizations that deal with a lot of transaction data (i.e. data that frequently changes).
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