As the global workplace evolves with an uncertain future of work, so does enterprise storage infrastructure. With business happening anywhere and anytime, business data needs to be agile and always available.
Legacy storage hardware just can’t keep up. So if you want to build for the future of work, software-defined storage is the only way to go.
Here’s what the storage infrastructure is for future work and why software-defined storage is the best way to build it.
What to expect when building storage infrastructure for the future of work
Whatever the future state of work, here are five things to keep in mind in order for your storage infrastructure to be truly future-proof:
Business data must be highly available
Except for “where” and “when”, business data should be readily available. Customers don’t like to wait. Delay hurts business and reputation.
If your customers, or DevOps, have to wait for you to find a way to access the data, it will hurt your business.
Note: High availability differs from data security. High availability means ensuring that data is always accessible, no matter what state it is in. This implies that high availability does not prevent accidental/malicious deletion, virus infection, or ransomware attacks.
Make sure you can scale the storage as needed
One thing is certain about the data that it will grow. Plan ahead and build a storage infrastructure that’s easy and quick to scale.
Be sure to balance things out. You don’t want to accumulate a lot of inactive servers or run out of available storage space too soon.
Data security is essential
Ransomware attacks are a real threat. With each attack, ransomware evolves. Your defense against ransomware needs to be maintained.
When building a storage infrastructure, don’t compromise on data security. It should not be an afterthought or the ultimate priority. Because it will cost you a lot more than the cost of using the data protection features.
Will data security add more to your budget? Pucca. However, would it be worth it? Most definitely.
You’ll probably also need cloud storage
Statista estimates that by 2020, about 50% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. Regardless of scale or industry, chances are you’ll need public/private cloud storage.
When building storage infrastructure or acquiring new storage systems, it’s a good idea to make sure a cloud connection is included.
Storage management should be easy
Flexible storage infrastructure is often difficult to manage due to their diverse range of capabilities. Depending on the software, the more features you add, the steeper the learning curve.
Once you’ve put hardware and software capabilities together, don’t forget to consider ease of use and storage management.
Management overhead, if ignored, can exceed the usefulness of a multi-purpose storage infrastructure.
It is challenging to build a storage infrastructure that checks all of the above requirements. And that’s where software-defined storage comes in.
Future-Proof Your Storage Infrastructure with Software-Defined Storage
Software-defined storage enables you to overcome the limitations of legacy infrastructure and build efficient storage with the future of work in mind.
With the right software-defined storage solution, you can:
Dynamically provisioned highly available storage
Virtualize available storage resources into a pool so that storage can be distributed and allocated for different user groups, projects and applications.
Software-defined storage provides cloud-like storage provisioning capabilities. You can provision storage with just a few clicks without interrupting any important operations.
Look for the following storage features for high availability:
synchronous (real time) replication
asynchronous replication
multi-site/multi-application replication
Storage Clustering with Automatic Failover and Failback
load balancing
Quickly and seamlessly scale storage capacity
Software-defined storage enables you to:
Scale up allocated storage, CPU and memory with just a few clicks.
Expand capacity by using integrated public/private cloud storage repositories.
Reclaim and rebalance idle capacity for new projects.
The ability to scale rapidly and without delay also enables the cost of storage to be controlled by starting smaller and scaling as the data grows.
Make your storage ransomware-proof
Most software-defined storage solutions come with some form of data protection. However, data protection features are offered as optional upgrades; Which means the price is not included in the standard license. Except for StoneFly’s software-defined storage, which uses them by default at no additional cost.