Unstructured data is changing. What was once a relatively small data set made up mostly of user home directory data is now a massive data set that is proliferating and is made up of much more than just user data. It includes log data, sensor data from IoT devices, ticker data, and structured text data. Unstructured data is also now the target of government and industry regulations that require organizations to follow specific protection and retention guidelines.
The problem is that most organizations have not evolved their data management strategy to meet all these new requirements. They backup unstructured data as an amorphous blog and have limited insight into the data the backup system stores. They also use backup as a means to meet data retention requirements. Most backup software vendors never designed their solutions for long-term data retention. Even if the organization has a strategy to archive or store data separately for compliance reasons, all organizations are struggling to keep up with the capacity demands that backup and archive are placing on their secondary storage infrastructures.
Many organizations look to cloud storage as a solution to the problem. Cloud storage does offer almost limitless storage capacity and frees the organization from upgrade concerns, but if the underlying on-premises data management solutions are not evolving to keep up with unstructured data growth and the regulations for protecting and retaining that data, then cloud storage really won’t be of much benefit.
Storage Switzerland’s white paper “How to Evolve From Unstructured Data Protection to Unstructured Data Management” details the unstructured data problem and provides organizations with a roadmap that helps them evolve their data management strategy from one of just “backing things up” to managing data and meeting regulations.
The white paper is available free to attendees of our Friday Storage Flash “Managing Unstructured Data in the Modern Data Center”. Our Friday Storage Flash webinars are 15-minute webinars that give you the information you need and then let you get back to work. Join experts from Storage Switzerland and Igneous as we discuss the unstructured data problem and how to fix it.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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