Guest Blog: Top Reasons for Moving Heavy Data from Local To Remote Storage

The inevitable growth of data generated every year makes the question about it's storage more and more vital. The digital content produced in some industries needs to be available on-demand and as fast as possible. The technology evolution made remote storage much more affordable, but many company owners and managers still don't understand its importance. Are the real benefits able to cover expenses? Here are the main reasons for moving your data to the remote storage:

l  Space. One of the main issues of the data storage is that the modern drive capacity increase is not fast enough to meet the needs of the explosive digital world. The largest standard disc drives can hold up to 4 terabytes of data nowadays and many companies have to use dozens or even hundreds of them. For instance the U.S. Library of Congress had over 240TB of data in 2012, Yahoo-like companies have about 200 PB on servers all around the world. Large amount of information of this kind needs a lot of storage space thus making the operations totally ineffective for small and mid-sized companies, as they'll need not only extra physical space for data storage but also additional personnel for maintenance and capacity model planning.

l  Data safety and archiving. Recent events have shown that natural or anthropogenic disasters may cause a major data loss that will lead to consequences like a drastic delay in operations or even total business termination. If your main server is down you have to be sure that your backup server is not affected by the same reasons, therefore it should be physically located in a quite long distance away. Another thing is a recovery and backup planning.  The remote storage staff usually traces software and hardware configurations and changes the data recovery plan on the fly. In most cases they test the recovery plan on regular basis to be prepared for any failures. Backup planning is also one of the primary activities along with error correction, protection from viruses and Continuous Data Protection.

l  Complexity and technical support. The technology of creating RAID (that stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks) on your local storage that is used in most server hardware needs special expertise and precise knowledge. There is an extensive number of configurations depending on speed and reliability and each of them has its pros and cons. What also needs to be said that RAID will increase the load of the operating system with much more calculations and operations. Anyway implementing this technology on your local servers will require more employees for support as troubleshooting is also an issue here. The modern RAID storage providers offer professional support and maintenance options simply because it's their primary work and the storage is located in the direct proximity. 

l  Performance. Modern remote storage companies offer many high-performance solutions such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI or InfiniBand that increase the effectiveness of data access. The InfiniBand technology is capable of data
transmitting on the speed of up to 40 Gbps, iSCSI is running over 10 Gbps Ethernet, and Fibre Channel is capable to provide the speed of up to 16 Gbps on large distances. These technologies may provide fast and faultless streaming of your data , what's especially important in broadcasting and video surveillance where a one second delay can be crucial for the whole business. Data optimization is also a vital component of the overall performance and includes data archiving, compression and encryption. The leading feature though is deduplication which purpose is identifying and deleting the copies of repeating data that rises the effectiveness dramatically.

Moving  to remote storage can be a huge step forward for any company that wants to be prepared for a huge data increase. The modern data storage providers are able to offer you enough space for all your needs,  full support and optimization services. These solutions still are not cheap, but worth investing in most cases.. Finding the right balance between your expenses, time and business productivity should be the most important things to consider.

What is your opinion about remote data storing? Are you going to switch to the RAID technology in the near future? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

Author’s Bio

Post by Jason Woodsworth -  a PR and marketing manager at www.raidixstorage.com, a provider of RAID storage solutions for businesses of any size with its principal product Raidix Storage.

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