A Smart Answer to the Big Data Challenge

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Imagine a floor (or two) in a large urban office tower, piled to the ceiling with bankers boxed filled with files. Taking up expensive and valuable office floor space, those boxes would be hurried out PDQ (pretty darned quickly) and placed into off-site storage.

But with no physical floor space to occupy, and no visible reminder of the storage space electronic data is actually occupying, many businesses today are becoming massive data hoarders, stockpiling electronic files by the million in storage devices locked away in the datacenter.

“Data volumes are growing at an alarming rate across the enterprise and yet organizations are doing very little about it,” says Dominique Koumi, Data Management Solutions Architect, CommVault Canada. In the majority of businesses today, there is no real strategy in place to consolidate data, eliminate duplication, or provide better access to information through search, backup and recovery, and business intelligence capability. Rather, most IT organizations today are simply throwing more disk at the problem. That’s not a solution; that’s just a temporary Band-Aid.”

Koumi explains how the storage problem has gotten so out of control. “Over the last ten years the ability to generate data has steadily grown. Take for instance a Finance department working on this quarter’s balance sheet. A comptroller will create the spreadsheet, then share the file with ten other people in the department. Each person that works on the file may save every round of changes they make under a separate file name. Add to that IT’s nightly backups of information stored on servers. You end up with the same file saved dozens of times using up unnecessary space in the data centre. Today’s rich media files now at play in the enterprise– images, sound files, videos destined for YouTube – all take up an immense amount of space. “Do we need to keep growing data and tasking the sytems? Koumi asks. “Or, is there a better way of optimizing data storage?  Interestingly enough, 80 percent of data in the enterprise today is stagnant. It doesn’t change, and yet we keep hanging onto each and every file and all versions for a ‘rainy day’.”

 Providing a solution to the out-of-control Big Data problem, CommVault has created Simpana® software, a single platform solution for data analysis, replication, protection, archiving and retrieval.  Unlike many of the traditional backup and retrieval solutions on the market today, Simpana software was built as a unified solution from the ground up – an advantage that allows for seamless interaction with data at any stage. “IT administrators are so accustomed to having one console to do backup; another for replication and so on. We offer them one GUI interface, one code base. It’s like a breath of fresh air for IT folks who are used to their technologies not working well together. Koumi gives a couple of examples that illustrate the power of the Simpana software platform. To solve the issue of data duplication, Simpana software offers de-duplication that searches the network to identify and eliminate up to 90 percent of redundant data taking up valuable disk space. For information retrieval, Simpana software offers powerful search capability for intelligent data mining across edge devices, public and private clouds, as well as application, archive and backup data.

 With Simpana software, IT operations teams finally have an opportunity to implement global policies to combat data storage challenges and stop the endless flow of budget dollars heading to increased disk space. “Finally there’s a smart answer to the storage dilemma,” says Koumi. “And it is right in the nick of time.”

Join FoxNet and Dominique Koumi, Data Management Solutions Architect, CommVault Canada on November 21st from 3pm to 5 pm for “Virtualize Fearlessly.”   Learn more and register today at:

http://go.206.198.186.83/virtualize-fearlessly-with-commvault–foxnet