It is a myth that organisations have to be huge to leverage hyperscale solutions. The simple truth is that data is growing a lot faster than storage budgets, which is proving challenging to businesses that do not have the resources of their larger counterparts.
By Johan Scheepers
As a result, enterprises are having to rethink how they use software-defined and commodity-based storage to lower costs and maintain the flexibility and scalability needed to keep up with business requirements, industry developments and competitors.
Hyperscale solutions can address this increasing trend towards enterprises leveraging their secondary storage as a means to advance their business, IT and broader digital transformation initiatives.by providing a unified, modern data protection and management platform that delivers cloud-like services on-premise.
Enterprises too are seeking the benefits of hyperscale computing, to achieve lower costs, greater efficiency and true server hardware commoditisation. According to the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant report, by 2022, more than 80% of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centres, up from 40% in 2018.
The report also states that end users have been reporting unstructured data growth as exceeding 50% year-over-year and are looking for flexible on-premises storage products that can address an increasing number of use cases with lower acquisition, operational and management costs.
Hyperscale is about achieving massive scale-out goals in computing, usually for purposes of big data or cloud computing, with the hardware and software designed for horizontal scalability that bring high levels of performance, throughput, and redundancy to enable fault tolerance and high availability.
Historically, many technology companies had recognised the scalability and flexibility of hyper-converged and scale-out architecture, but much of the horizontal scaling debate had been focused on the primary storage tier.
Recently however, it has become increasingly clear that scale-out architecture helps eliminate silos in backup and archive, enabling enterprises to scale horizontally as their data grows. It is then, no surprise, that as businesses continue to look for new ways to get increased value from secondary data, they are finding that their current architectures simply cannot meet the demands of storing and managing increasing workloads, while they evolve to newer environments.
At the same time, enterprise IT is undergoing a transformation with the maturing of public cloud providers that offer compute, storage and application services with unprecedented elasticity, scale, resiliency and availability, on a consumption-based economic model.
With some workloads shifting to the cloud, enterprises, regardless of size, need to transform their internal data centres and service offerings for more cloud-like scale, flexibility, resiliency and operational methods, which in turn lead to similar economic outcomes.
Therefore, architects are augmenting or replacing traditional, proprietary and single purpose IT infrastructure and applications with software defined services, distributed processing, big-data applications and hyper-converged architectures running on general purpose, easily (and affordably) replaceable hardware.
Transforming mission-critical applications and workloads can prove to be difficult and disruptive, but this is not the case for secondary infrastructure. It is estimated that most infrastructure capacity is used for secondary workloads and storage, meaning businesses can accelerate their transformation initiatives with less disruption by targeting this secondary tier of infrastructure.
Hyperscale solutions enable this shift for secondary storage and workloads, driving cloud-like economics and critical services using secondary data, while also offering the option to extend these services into the public cloud.
By harnessing the right hyperscale offering, customers can benefit from true enterprise-scale coverage with an integrated, modern scale-out approach to meet all current and future data demands of their businesses, while at the same time, adding market-leading data management software fully baked-in as a matter of course too.
- Johan Scheepers is the country head of Commvault South Africa