Data and storage have been intertwined from the beginning of recorded history, when bureaucrats in Mesopotamia around 3,000 B.C. used primitive tablets to record the allocation of rations (beer was one of the most popular items, according to the British Museum) and to inventory goods.

For thousands of years, the same basic concept held true: More information meant simply adding more places to put it.  That’s how the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, has ended up with more than 37 million books.

The same model has applied to the computer age.

Until now, when that paradigm has broken down.

The amount of data being generated in today’s always-on, digital world is nearly incomprehensible. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) creates enough data each day to equal twice the Library of Congress.

Today’s enterprise storage systems can’t possibly keep up with all this data, let alone manage it. Most companies have to shell out more and more money to constantly add capacity.

An even bigger issue than cost is the lack of real-time intelligence about data provided by traditional storage systems. As the Taneja Group aptly put it in a recent report, “Instead of data being an asset, it is a dead weight that keeps getting heavier. If we didn’t do something about it we would simply be overwhelmed.”

But there’s a new solution: Data-Aware Storage. It builds real-time analytics directly into the storage itself in contrast to the old approach of storage as a passive “dumb big bucket” dumping ground.

Leveraging the price/performance benefits of commodity hardware coupled with the modern technologies of flash, virtualization and the cloud, Data-Aware Storage is all about managing the data through smart software rather than worrying about the storage hardware underneath it all.

This solves the data management problems created by first-generation scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) products, which essentially were dumb because they provided no visibility into which data is most valuable, where it is stored, who’s accessing it, what should be archived, backed up or deleted, and why data grows.

With Data-Aware Storage, enterprises get a speedy, actionable view of the petabytes of data they’re collecting. It’s a powerful weapon in slaying the dragon of ever-rising capital expenditures for storage hardware and the resulting data management nightmares.

True Data-Aware Storage has six common characteristics.

1. Real-time analytics is baked directly into the file system as an intrinsic element of storage.
2. It’s a software-only solution, running on commodity hardware on-premise, as a virtual machine and in the cloud.
3. It’s a flash-first hybrid design that enables maximum price/performance and price/capacity flexible configurations.
4. It’s a SaaS application development model, providing production-ready software releases every two weeks with software subscription pricing.
5. It’s no-compromise storage, optimized for the widest range of workloads and file sizes.
6. It’s 100 percent programmable, with an interactive REST API browser built into the web interface, allowing open and available APIs.

With intuitive real-time analytics built directly into the file system, a company can quickly understand which projects are putting a strain on capacity or performance. The system proactively identifies bottlenecks before systems are impacted and increases scalability and elasticity to handle peak loads.

After: Storage management is transformed into a minimal task – taking just minutes every week – because of real-time visibility into file usage, capacity and performance, increased storage capacity without adding more hardware and “pay-as-you-grow” flexibility.

Instead of being forced to police storage use because it has no way to understand in real time what files and projects are consuming storage, administrators can automatically and rapidly pinpoint which users or workloads are affecting performance and capacity, and which files should be archived, backed up or deleted.
Clay tablets were right for their time in ancient Mesopotamia. Traditional scale-out NAS was right for its time too, but today’s unprecedented data volume demands a new solution: Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS that enables organizations to reduce costs, increase performance and unlock the value of the data being stored.

Photo by Sam Howzit