The market for enterprise storage data is witnessing explosive growth. Applications including social media, server virtualization, cloud services, and big data analytics are fueling the growth of data that organizations produce, access, and retain. Being a key part of the IT industry worldwide today, the global spending on data storage is predicted to cross the $51 billion mark by 2019, according to Statista.
While data storage contributes a major chunk to the overall IT services spending, which is expected to score revenue of a staggering $733.9 billion by 2020. These statistics are enough to convince enterprises of the importance of storage data and the number of benefits in store for their business. This is where the need for NetApp training arises for students and professionals to stay updated with the latest IT tools and technologies, also involving enterprise storage data and its significance for businesses processes.
NetApp systems allow users to select the type of storage that best fits their business needs. Enterprises can create their Data Fabric featuring the market’s widest portfolio of all-flash, hybrid-flash, and object storage systems. Either organizations intend to take their business app to the next level, provide a cost-effective solution through solid-state drive (SSD) and hard disk (HDD) features, or optimize their data management practices at scale through a software-based, object-defined cloud storage platform, here are the practical benefits you should know of storing enterprise data on NetApp systems.
Secure data storage
Undoubtedly, data storage comes as the foremost benefit that companies enjoy keeping their and clients’ confidential information safe through appropriate tools and practices. It enables the company in designing, constructing, migrating, protecting, and performing relevant data management activities. This liberty brings forward the enterprise’s agility when employing the self-service portal offered by the hosting storage service. Through powerful data management activities, organizations can consistently analyze gaps in their data growth and if there is a need to shift their data to a more secure location.
Login from anywhere
When the data isn’t tied to any specific computer, it can be literally accessed from anywhere across the globe. Users get free from the remote location element and acquire remote access. This is particularly important in order to cater consistently evolving projects, or even when a disaster hits the business and there is a concern for the loss of data or downtime.
Reliability
Companies tend to generate and store huge loads of data only because it offers reliability in retrieving. Do note that any structure connected with the internet is prone to a certain rate of data errors. Hence, a powerful storage system will provide you with a reliable means of recovering the lost data. This is easily done by creating multiple copies of the data and store in different geographical locations. In case one repository is lost for whatever reason, it can be readily stored from a different location. Some storage systems also incorporate data coding schemes that recalculate the lost data without incurring the storage space penalty of saving the complete copies. However, such a data recovery system needs to be as seamless as possible, i.e., the lost data should be recaptured through clear transparency to the system users.
Responsiveness
It doesn’t matter if the users of the data storage system are IT personnel, computer applications, or machines, all will be looking to see how quickly their requests for particular datasets are catered. A storage system that consumes time to retrieve and deliver the required data is practically considered useless, in most cases. While a strong enterprise storage system is expected to be downright responsive providing near-instant access to data to authorized users.
24/7 availability
In case of emergencies, the data can be easily retrieved on a remote basis only if you have strong internet connectivity and login credentials. Despite the 24/7 availability of data, there is also an equal risk of data loss and corruption when events of downtimes hit organizations. Hence, it is advised for the IT teams to design recovery methods and backup plans to mitigate data loss and the costs incurred along. The tendency to retrieve data at any time indicates that the business operations won’t be affected or halted due to lack of information.
A cost-effective approach
Another benefit that is often discussed with NetApp systems and enterprise storage resource management practices. Obviously, the prospect of managing in-house data servers is quite expensive. The organization will require space, equipment, and an experienced IT team to manage the system. These are the costs that can be easily avoided by replacing it with a cloud storage system without needing to incur complicated and costly hardware and maintenance expenditures.
Best use of server space
Due to NetApp’s top-notch machines and infrastructure in place, enterprises and IT teams can now use the available data storage space more efficiently. Users can simply compress data, leaving them a considerable free space and not needing to shift to a larger system. This “thin provisioning” feature allows the users to allow a predefined amount of server space to a particular application and ensure that no space on their server goes wasted.
Consider an example in which your business provides 5,000 users with storage for home directories. As per your calculation, the largest home directories will eat around 1 GB of space. In such a situation, you can buy 5 TB of physical storage. And for every volume that captures a home directory, you would have ample space reserved to cater to the needs of the biggest customers. On the other hand, you should be aware that home directory capacity needs differ considerably across your community. While for each large user of storage space, there are around 10 other users who consume negligible or no space at all.
The above benefits clearly identify what it takes to load an enterprise’s storage data on NetApp systems. While both IT students and professionals can pursue rigorous, productive NetApp certification and read practical, training-based blogs to better equip their technical skillset and benefit their organizations through data and management excellence.
Get in touch with one of our NetApp experts to learn more about our training modules and programs.