The digital age in which we live demands consistent innovation in storage concepts. Companies large and small are interested in scalability, reliability, performance, and – perhaps most of all – cost. We live in an age of infinite storage possibilities and, in the minds of many, infinite storage space. In a monumental announcement on September 29, 2023, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, revealed they had achieved an astonishing milestone: 1 exabyte (or 1 million terabytes) of open-source storage, marking a new “space race” for the digital age.
Within this new digital “space race,” storage concepts are being introduced regularly, all taking into account a part or the whole of the demands of the business world in the shape of better scalability, reliability, performance, or lower cost. Yet even in a world of infinite storage concepts, innovation is still welcomed, and novel storage technologies are reshaping the digital landscape as we know it.
Emerging Innovations in the Big Data Revolution
The fires of the Big Data Revolution are still burning brightly. With expanded storage capability, countless amounts of data can now be stored, organized, analyzed, and used to help leaders learn more about their businesses, consumer behavior, health outcomes, and other valuable insights.
Anything considered “big data,” such as the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated daily from cell phones, requires expanded storage. This is where the infinite storage innovators come in.
The most innovative storage concepts are improving storage in multiple dimensions simultaneously, providing scalability and reliability at a reasonable price point. Cost is at the top of the priority list for most businesses because, although the need for infinite storage is rising, storage budgets remain stagnant.
Increasing capacity, performance, and reliability are also primary concerns of businesses dealing with “big data.” In most cases, for enterprises to scale both capacity and performance non-disruptively, a cluster architecture is required since increasing capacity or performance requires more nodes to be joined to that cluster. Performance is integral for mission-critical applications that need fast access to data, especially workloads such as in-memory databases or AI/ML analytics. For a system to be considered reliable, the storage system as a whole must provide high availability of storage services while protecting the data loss against component, software, or data center failure.
Reshaping the Digital Landscape
As digital storage solutions become more cost-effective, enterprises can retain far more data, and as scalability increases, large data lakes can be accessed as one large unit rather than segregated data sets. Similarly, as the reliability of digital storage solutions increases, enterprises can use their data as a digital currency because the underlying storage utility is always available without data loss.
With each innovation, companies can reframe how they view data storage and, eventually, use the data that they are able to better store. However, massive increases in storage capabilities bring about some questions and concerns for businesses.
While CERN’s recent achievement of 1 exabyte of storage exemplifies the tremendous potential of open-source digital data storage, it also highlights the need for access to resources and expert direction for companies to take advantage of infinite storage options. The expanded capabilities and lowered cost of infinite storage resources are changing how IT teams, processes, and on-site hardware approach these solutions.
As storage capabilities evolve, they must be adaptable and increasingly scalable. A storage solution that isn’t scalable eventually fills up, and no additional data can be written without creating a separate instance of that storage solution. It’s like filling a bucket of water. Eventually, you will reach the top of the bucket – unless you learn to build a bigger bucket.
Excitement on the Horizon
What may be the most exciting development in infinite storage concepts is happening quietly with open-source Ceph systems. Ceph possesses all the qualities that companies seek with reliability, scalability, and cost. However, it also carries with it the need for expert management because Ceph was made by developers, for developers, which can make it challenging to implement, build, and maintain.
Fortunately, there are innovations emerging on a regular basis designed to make the use of systems such as Ceph easier for common IT teams. As more complex systems are brought to the table, companion management systems could make those complex programs as easy to build and operate as proprietary systems.
As big data continues to grow and companies strive to keep up, the eye of the digital world will be trained on how vast the storage capabilities can become. As long as companies keep abreast of novel technologies and make them accessible to companies big and small, the Big Data Revolution will continue to bring positive changes to the business world.