Now that hoarding has become fodder for reality television programming, it might be appropriate to address “digital” hoarding and how MonadCloud can help you cope with the avalanche of data accumulating around you in your organization.
It wasn’t too long ago that having a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of data in a business was only something that large corporations accumulated. Today, laptops and PCs can be purchased with a terabyte disk drive installed. With so much storage available, just what are people doing with it?
The answer is they are using their storage devices to accumulate “unstructured” data. Unstructured data for most individuals includes emails, photos, videos, and music files. Organizations also accumulate unstructured data in the form of emails, media files, scanned documents, images, test data, log files, backup data and office files like text documents, worksheets, drawings and presentations. Unstructured refers to the fact that the data files are not “structured” or contained in a database. They are just files sitting on spinning disks and there are a lot of them.
Currently, unstructured data accounts for 80 percent of the data that resides within an organization. The estimated growth rate for unstructured data is 10-to-50 times that of structured data. With that kind of growth rate something has got to give. But wait a second, what about all of those cheap terabyte disk drives? Yes, a bare disk drive is relatively cheap, but everything else that goes along with managing your data is not. Disk drives are one part of a system to store and manage data.
Historically, the more sophisticated and expandable the storage system, the more it costs. IT staff must be trained and experienced in the management of things like disk drive arrays (RAID), Storage Area Networks (SANs) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Primary data storage systems require floor space and must be supplied with power and located in a suitable environment. And every 3-to-5 years they will need to be upgraded and eventually replaced at a non-trivial cost. Yes, disk drives are relatively cheap but storage systems and storage networks are not.
So how does MonadCloud offer relief from the treadmill of primary data storage expansion needed to contain all of this growth in unstructured data? First, your MonadCloud's storage cluster simplifies storage of your unstructured data. Object based storage is simpler to use and manage than legacy block and file storage. Second, your MonadCloud cluster has one of the lowest Total Cost of Ownership in the storage industry. Low means around $0.01/GB per month. Third, your MonadCloud cluster is “infinitely” expandable. You don't have to estimate how much storage you will need over the next 3-to-5 years. Just add additional storage servers when you need them in order to meet your requirements. MonadCloud storage clusters can be expanded from tens of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes of storage and from a handful of storage servers to hundreds of storage servers in a single cluster.
MonadCloud works with its customers to design, build, maintain, monitor and support their clusters. You can locate your MonadCloud cluster on your premises or in a secure co-location facility, which has adequate power, air-handling, fire-suppression and emergency power generation. Your connection to your MonadCloud storage cluster can be over your internal network or over the Internet.
So why else would you consider deploying a MonadCloud cluster for your data storage? What are some additional reasons? Your MonadCloud storage cluster is a good place to keep copies of your PC and server backups or snapshots as part of a disaster recovery plan. Cloud storage is good place to “park” data you don’t need very often but may need to retrieve at random, which is something tape backup is not particularly good at. Cloud storage reduces your need to keep expanding your primary data storage systems. There are estimates that an organization only accesses 15 percent of the data it is storing on a regular basis. So, why continue to fill up your expensive primary storage systems with infrequently accessed data when you can securely and reliably store it on your MonadCloud cluster for less? Cloud storage is also a good place to archive data you may need to keep for compliance or governance reasons.
Cloud storage has evolved to become business-class storage that can help you cope with the rapid growth of unstructured data in your organization. MonadCloud can work with you to design and build a storage cluster that best meets your requirements.