Emerging technology helps organizations deal with growing amounts of unstructured data.
Enterprises today face the challenge of managing and storing an ever-increasing amount of file-based content such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, video and audio. Industry experts say this unstructured content now represents 70 percent to 80 percent of all stored information, and will continue to grow faster than traditional transaction-based data for the foreseeable future.
A recent study by data storage consultants at The Taneja Group says the rapid growth of unstructured data is creating significant operational challenges for end-users. More than 50 percent of IT professionals surveyed said they had 11TB or more of unstructured data in their environment, while 62 percent reported that their unstructured information was growing between 16 percent and 75 percent each year.
Respondents said that the major drivers of unstructured data growth were Microsoft Office (78 percent), e-mail attachments (66 percent), and backup and archival (81 percent). Unlike data stored in databases, ERP applications and accounting systems, this unstructured content can be difficult to search and manage. File systems organize data in hierarchical directories with location-based addressing schemes, and each end-user comes up with his own file-naming conventions. The data is not ranked in terms of importance, and file-based information is typically scattered across network data stores.
Reducing Complexity
Many organizations are implementing a relatively new technique called file virtualization to migrate, tier, balance and replicate file data while reducing capital expenditures and operating costs. File virtualization essentially provides a single, unchanging point through which users access their files — even if those files are stored on multiple storage systems in different locations.
The key to managing increasingly complex and inflexible file storage infrastructures lies in the ability to eliminate the static mapping between client and storage resources, allowing the composition of storage resources to change and data to move freely between resources, without impacting the client access to data. File virtualization does exactly that.
It provides a layer of intelligence in the network that decouples the logical access to files from the physical location of those files. With this layer in place, data is free to move and storage resources are free to change, without the disruption previously associated with these actions.
File virtualization appliances from vendors such as F5 Networks, Attune Systems, EMC, Brocade and NetApp use industry-standard file access protocols to communicate with clients and servers — CIFS for Windows devices and NFS for UNIX or Linux devices. These appliances act as a proxy for existing file systems, making all transactions between the client and back end look the same.
Simplifying Migration
File virtualization is ideal for tiered storage infrastructures because it allows data migrations between file servers to be conducted transparently. In the past, if files were moved or storage was reconfigured, access was interrupted as storage administrators had to reconfigure login scripts and drive mappings to access the new location. With file virtualization, these changes become invisible to users and application managers.
File virtualization also provides the ability to create disk-based replicas of file data that can be used for disaster recovery applications. Storage managers can define groups of files to be asynchronously replicated, either locally or remotely, across an IP network. Replication can occur at regularly scheduled intervals with only file changes being transmitted in order to preserve WAN bandwidth.
Taneja Group identified three categories of customer benefits that would result from implementing file virtualization solutions: centralized management and security, highly available data access and data protection, as well as cost reduction and optimization. The analyst firm predicts that “the need to consolidate and centralize controls over unstructured data will shape the evolution of the storage industry and drive significant innovation for the foreseeable future.”
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