Smooth sailing to the cloud with the Dell DX Object Storage Platform

When you think of the word “cloud” in terms of information technology (IT), what does it mean to you? It is a dark and hazy horizon full of security risks, or a bright blue frontier where IT can transform businesses? Does storing data out on the cloud feel like traveling on an ill-equipped small boat across the ocean, subject to its perils and lost in its massiveness?

We are in the midst of a dynamic world connected through social and business networks that create interactive relationships, resulting in an explosion of new data.  This data growth is surpassing IT budget increases; however IT organizations are still tasked to ensure data remains accessible for business, analytics and compliance needs.

Many organizations would like to implement a cloud strategy to help address data growth based on three pressing challenges. First, there is continuing business pressure to implement more cost-effective and agile IT services. Secondly, organizations are being asked to provide data storage with high availability and fast performance which is also scalable for future data demands. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, customers are striving to enhance data protection to help ensure business continuity.

Object storage is quickly becoming the standard for cloud storage infrastructure and Web 2.0 communities. It can be that state-of-the-art vessel that lets you navigate and control your course of direction in a cloud environment. Many service providers of public cloud storage today have developed their own object-based infrastructure.

Equipping Your Vessel

There are several key tenets generally required for a cloud service offering that match the architecture and features of an object storage platform:

  • A cost-efficient platform that allows a scale-on-demand model could help organizations meet varying data growth and streamline budgets. Near limitless scalability and ease of management is required to address the large amounts of ever-growing data and could be achieved through clustering storage on standard x86 hardware platforms.
  • Additionally, cloud infrastructures should be self-managing and self-healing with the ability to automatically rebalance workloads in case of node failure to provide continuous availability.
  • To protect the data in the petabyte and multi-petabyte range, a data protection scheme like replication is ideal because backup simply cannot be done efficiently.  Multi-tenant functionality helps provide appropriate data access based on department or organization and immutability options are important to protect data based on an organization’s policies or industry regulations.
  • Rich metadata support can enhance search, intelligent information management/distribution and analytics, removing the danger of data being “lost at sea” in a large cloud environment.

Finding a safe harbor

Deploying an object-based storage platform on-premise, as a private cloud is a way to use and understand cloud storage in a safe environment before advancing to a more complex hybrid or public cloud.  Private storage clouds can help fulfill a variety of use cases including internal “dropbox” file-sharing functionality and highly expandable secure regulatory archive.

Beginning your voyage

The Dell DX Object Storage Platform is changing the economics of cloud and archive deployments through intelligent object storage technology to support your long-term vision at massive scale. Help increase data value while reducing data costs with the self-healing, self-managing, and metadata-aware DX Object Storage Platform that can seamlessly scale to multiple petabytes.

An easy HTTP interface provides private, hybrid or public cloud connections while immutability options and multi-tenancy can ensure that organizations can safely access and protect their data by group or department. The simple-to-manage DX Object Storage Platform can help your data stay available and protected with integrity, authenticity and retention capabilities delivered through automated policy-based management options.  The DX Object Storage Platform in conjunction with a certified technology partner can offer “dropbox” functionality that can enhance mobile user productivity via secure collaboration capabilities across devices of choice. This blog offers more detail about an offering to help keep data behind the corporate firewall.

The DX Object Storage Platform allows you to choose an archive storage environment today and a cloud-based storage environment tomorrow. Or you can begin with an on-premise, private cloud storage environment today with the added capability of automated retention policies to help meet regulatory guidelines and/or keep your data for a long period of time.

With Dell, you have the choice of which path to the cloud is right for your organization—and it is smooth sailing with the Dell DX Object Storage Platform.

Learn more about the Dell DX Object Storage Platform by participating in the HOL lab, advanced whiteboard session, and roadmap NDA session at the Dell Storage Forum in Paris this week.

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About the Author: Derek Gascon