The world has seen so many changes over the last couple of years, with many of them playing out in the technology realm – digital transformation; the rapid adoption of cloud; new security threats; the massive increase in gaming; and hybrid working are just some of the new technology drivers that have come to the fore.
One thing all these disparate trends have in common is that they have a big impact on how data is stored and accessed.
“Data has seen massive growth in the last few years, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down,” says Kobus Burnett, territory lead: South, East and West Africa at Seagate.
Indeed, research done by IDC shows that the amount of new data created each year is growing at a compound annual growth rate of about 26% between 2015 and 2025. Up to 175 zettabytes of new data will be created in 2025 compared to 18 zettabytes in 2015.
“Organisations today are facing the challenge of an increased amount of data entering from different sources,” he points out. “And if this data is not stored correctly, it will be very difficult to reach at a later stage – which will increase the time and investment required to address the issue.”
Not only is there more data out there, it’s more complex too.
“Organisations today are geared towards structured data and most systems are setup in that way,” Burnett says. “Databases where data and information are stored are setup in a traditional way for structured data – but a massive 80% of the data that enters an organisation today are unstructured data.
“This adds even more complexity to manage and maintain.”
To make matters even more challenging, there’s a bigger range in terms of data diversity too.
“The issue here is the unstructured data and the rate at which it is created,” Burnett explains. “Data created by analytics, artificial intelligence, deep learning and an increasing number of IoT devices are just a few examples of this massive growth in unstructured data.”
Storage technology has grown and adapted to meet these new challenges, and to position organisations for future change and the data growth they can expect to experience.
Cloud storage
Burnett describes cloud storage is simply offsite computing that holds your data for you to access anytime, anywhere.
“Some of the benefits of using the cloud include flexibility, disaster recovery, automatic software updates, affordable pricing structures and increased collaboration between team members,” he says.
“On the downside, you don’t always know where your data is being stored and this may cause security and compliance risks in some industries.”
Connectivity can also be an issue with cloud storage as data might not always be accessible if the user isn’t connected to the Internet.
Server-based storage
Server Based storage is data stored within individual servers on site or at data centres.
“This type of storage is typically relevant for the business working within a budget and physical space,” Burnett believes. “Despite the high price associated with server-based storage, the business with a budget will appreciate the in-house control and the fact that they can streamline the management of their data.”
Seagate solutions
Seagate offers customers a range of storage solutions, suitable for a variety of users.
Burnett highlights the new “Lyve Cloud” Storage as a Service solution that has been launched recently.
“This is our simple, trusted, efficient and always on SaaS solution,” he says. “It is currently available in the US, but we will be launching it in the South African market soon, and expect a lot of interest from our resellers partners and customers.”
When it comes to systems solutions, Seagate has a number of options.
“We have JBODs and expansion shelves, all-flash, hybrid and disk arrays and also our Compute and Storage Convergence platforms,” says Burnett. “All of these systems are available on special request.”
A new category of intelligent storage
Seagate’s Exos® CORVAULT™ system is a high-performance, self-healing block storage system that delivers multi-petabyte capacity, five-nines availability, and hyperscale efficiencies for data centre and macro edge environments.
It’s a high density system with hyperscale efficiency, letting users deploy the latest, highest capacity, most efficient hard drives for similar storage economics of cutting-edge cloud services.
Resilience is built into the intelligent architecture, ensuring 99,999% availability with fast read/writes, powerful dual controllers, and optimal design for uninterrupted performance.
It’s secure thanks to self-encrypting hard drives with HDDs that come with Seagate Secure™ self-encrypting technology, SFTP support, and optional FIPS 140-3 configuration.
The self-healing feature is particularly significant, says Burnett. “While data creation is growing exponentially, IT teams and budgets are not. That’s why we built Exos® CORVAULT™. As a set-and-forget solution, you can store mass data with less human intervention. The system heals itself on the fly thanks to Seagate Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR).”
This also reduces the environmental impact of computer e-waste as ADR drives are renewed instead of discarded. Manual drive swaps are cut down, and the system can return most drives to dependable service by reconfiguring the drive to bypass errant components.
Seagate hard drives and controller firmware CIOs to optimise their data centre, Burnett adds, delivering maximum data density in a smaller footprint with the most advanced drives in the datasphere.
“And you get quicker time to insights, with the purpose-built architecture delivering fast response and low latency to your business.”
Exos® CORVAULT™ drives have a 12 Gb/s HD-Mini SAS interface, sequential read/write up to 14 Gb/s and 12 Gb/s, and IOPS of up to 17 680.
Seagate ADAPT erasure coding utilises highly efficient declustered parity to span all drives in the pool for less capacity overhead, better performance and faster rebuilds than RAID.
The 6th gen VelosCT™ ASIC-based architecture powers fully redundant, hot-swappable, active-active dual controllers for high availability, compatibility and predictable performance.
The Exos® CORVAULT™ lets organistions harness peak drive performance and longevity, with a modular chassis that protects against vibrational and acoustic interference, excess heat, and external power irregularities.
Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies ensure consistent and efficient noise-free power with highly responsive burst capacity; and hot-swappable drives, controllers, and fans enable uninterrupted performance during service.
Powerful onboard management is accessible via web GUI or CLI provides one-button configuration for fast and easy deployment; and it features remote diagnostics and non-disruptive updates.
Security is vital, and Exos® CORVAULT™ brings maximum security to the data without controller-level overhead. All included HDDs come standard with Seagate Secure self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and SFTP support for secure file transfers. Optional FIPS 140-3 configuration is also available.
Seagate in sub-Saharan Africa
Kobus Burnett is the territory lead for South, East and West Africa at Seagate, a position he has held for the past three years.
He is responsible for various business segments and looks after Enterprise, Surveillance, NAS, Gaming, Consumer and to a small degree, Seagate’s EDS Systems
Burnett has a long history with the company as he has been involved with the Seagate brand for around 11 years.
Although 90% of the local Seagate business is within South Africa, countries like Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Mauritius and a few others are responsible are active and seeing positive growth.
There are two authorised Seagate distributors in South Africa.