How to Maximize Primary Storage ROI and Data Protection

Storage optimization—matching storage to data’s performance, capacity, security, and accessibility needs. Learn how this maximizes primary storage ROI.

Bill Kleyman

March 19, 2015

2 Min Read
How to Maximize Primary Storage ROI and Data Protection
Image courtesy of tigger11th at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Do more with less seems to be the dogmatic decree that confronts today’s IT professionals as they struggle to reconcile constrained budgets with apparently limitless growth in unstructured and structured data. With costly primary storage rapidly filling up, the need to migrate less active data onto a more cost-effective storage tier is clear.

Storage optimization — matching storage to data’s performance, capacity, and accessibility needs — entails moving infrequently-accessed data off expensive, high-performance primary storage to less costly, lower-performance secondary storage.

In this white paper from Nexsan, we learn how this maximizes primary storage ROI by freeing up more capacity, boosting performance, shrinking the backup window, and reducing its cost by ensuring all of the data that remains on it actually needs to be there.

The sheer volume and variety of ways in which data can be breached is daunting, including silent data corruption due to hardware failure and software failure, malicious attacks from cybercriminals, or human error such as accidental file deletion or overwriting by employees. Yet for all too many data center managers, their response to these threats seems to be a strategy based on ... hope.

Unless they can answer the following four critical questions, their data protection strategy is tantamount to just hoping that nothing goes wrong:

  1. How do you know if all your files are in your backup or archive?

  2. How do you know if there is a second copy of all your files at your remote site?

  3. What is the health (integrity) of your files at each site?

  4. If the files are different, which file is the correct one?

The answers to these questions — and indeed the answer to this dilemma — comes from purpose-built secure archive solutions, which are specifically designed to provide maximum data security, integrity and privacy from the moment a file is ingested into the archive.

Remember, explosive data growth is highlighting the inefficiencies of housing huge quantities of unstructured and structured data on costly primary storage. The vast majority of this data is seldom accessed, and doesn’t require the high performance (and high costs) that primary storage entails. Not all data is equal, and IT managers are applying storage optimization principles to better match storage to data’s performance, capacity, and connectivity needs.

But as these storage optimization initiatives migrate less-active data from primary to archive storage, a crucial issue is frequently overlooked—the risk of data loss. Download this white paper today to learn how Nexsan Assureon secure archive solutions are purpose-built to deliver unrivaled data protection for archive data, whether it’s stored for days or decades.

About the Author

Bill Kleyman

Bill Kleyman has more than 15 years of experience in enterprise technology. He also enjoys writing, blogging, and educating colleagues about tech. His published and referenced work can be found on Data Center Knowledge, AFCOM, ITPro Today, InformationWeek, NetworkComputing, TechTarget, DarkReading, Forbes, CBS Interactive, Slashdot, and more.

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