The Pros and Cons of Today’s Storage Technologies

praveenmanohar over 8 years ago 3 minute read time

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 3^rd 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).

Top Comments

Jfrazier over 8 years ago +1

Thanks for putting this into a tabular view...easier to figure out the differences.

byrona over 8 years ago

praveenmanohar‌, this is a great overview! Where does something like a more classic EMC or NetApp fit into this?
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gfsutherland over 8 years ago

Great reference... Thanks for doing this!!!
Have saved for future reference.....
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Jfrazier over 8 years ago

Thanks for putting this into a tabular view...easier to figure out the differences.
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