Data growth still a challenge for storage management

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 10 February 2011 17:02

The amount of data being stored continues to grow, but the industry has more sophisticated answers than simply throwing more drives at the problem.

Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems told iTWire that his company can offer its customers more than just additional storage spindles.



To start with, new drives have higher capacities, meaning more data can be stored in the same space.

But by also applying technologies such as virtualisation, tiering and dynamic provisioning, it's possible to store more data in less space, at a lower cost and yet with higher performance.

For example, an existing array of 300GB enterprise-class drives could be replaced with a small number of solid state drives (SSDs), several high-speed disk drives, and as many 1TB drives as needed to provide the total capacity.

This, Mr Yoshida said, would reduce the total number of drives and thus the space needed, reduce the total cost, and yet give three to five times better performance thanks to the speed of the SSDs.

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