You Can’t Afford to Ignore Big Changes in Data Storage

Several of our recent posts have discussed the ongoing data explosion and how it’s affecting every enterprise across every industry today. Whether your IT team has begun to face the challenge or not, finding a storage solution that can keep up with the exponential surge of data is quickly becoming a business imperative.

Massive volumes of enterprise data can be the catalyst to a wealth of innovations and the foundation for new ways of doing business—but those volumes are also forcing enterprises to completely redefine data storage.

It’s a concern for a majority of companies, and it should be for you, too. For 55 percent of enterprises in a recent study, the skyrocketing growth of data and data storage technology was the largest factor driving change in IT infrastructure—even beating out the need to integrate with cloud services.[1] That means your competitors and peers are aware of the issue and likely taking action as well.

The bottom line is, you can’t afford not to change. It’s not a matter of whether your data storage will need to expand—it’s a matter of how soon. And your current system just isn’t going to keep up. It doesn’t scale the way you’ll need it to and your storage requirements will quickly outpace your budget.  The businesses that thrive in this data-dominated world are the ones that recognize when the status quo is no longer sufficient to meet evolving needs.

Today’s data explosion calls for data storage that’s massively scalable. Simple. Flexible. And cost-efficient. That’s why more enterprises are turning to software-defined storage (SDS) as the solution that can tame the data beast. With SDS, you move away from large, costly proprietary hardware and use commodity servers to build out your storage infrastructure with smart open-source based software.

Those enterprises that have recognized the sea change and acted on it are already reaping the rewards. Germany’s University Hospital Essen, a major institution that serves the wider Ruhr metropolitan area, saw storage costs rise rapidly as its data volumes increased. Hospital IT staff turned to SDS, which was not widely known at the time, and implemented SUSE Enterprise Storage. The benefits were immediate. Where it had usually taken three months to implement a new mid-range storage system, now IT could simply order a new commodity server and add its capacity to the storage pool within days—at 70 to 80 percent lower expenditure.

With high performance and availability, plus the scalability, flexibility and budget-friendly pricing you need, it’s no wonder that IDC has predicted that the worldwide SDS market will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.5 percent between 2017 and 2021.[2]

SDS doesn’t have to be daunting. Especially when you look at true SDS in the form of the open source project Ceph. It’s one of the most popular open source SDS storage solutions today and has built up a large, active group of users who continually refine it. That’s why it forms the foundation for SUSE Enterprise Storage.

Don’t wait to give your enterprise the scale and simplicity of SDS, the data storage solution that can take your business into the next decades with confidence. The better you can store and manage your data, the more value you can extract from it—and that’s key to staying competitive.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts, where we’ll delve a little deeper into SDS and demonstrate how it can help transform the way you look at data storage.

[1] 2018 State of Infrastructure, Interop ITX and InformationWeek, December 2017.

[2] “IDC Forecasts Software-Defined Storage Solutions to Generate Worldwide Revenues of Nearly $16.2 Billion in 2021,” IDC press release, October 4, 2017.