Enterprise Strategy Group on ECS: Meet data growth challenges with software-defined object storage

“This new era of massive content storage environments requires a new storage architecture, object storage.” That’s the view of Scott Sinclair, Storage Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) in its October 2015 whitepaper: “EMC Elastic Cloud Storage Offers Resilient Scalability for the New Generation of Workloads”. Let’s explore why ESG believes object storage is an essential enterprise technology.

Identifying The Challenges Of Data Growth

Managing today’s ever-growing quantities of (mostly unstructured) data is a constant challenge for most enterprises – a fact that ESG underlines in its whitepaper. ESG asked 373 IT decision-makers: “What are your organization’s biggest challenges in terms of its storage environment?

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The rapid growth of data was cited as a top challenge by 26% of IT decision-makers, which ESG says should not be a surprise. However, what may be more surprising is that all the other top challenges – including increased hardware costs, data protection costs, and staffing costs – can also be considered symptoms of data growth.

Why The Industry Is Moving To Object Storage

ESG says that object-based storage offers a strong solution to meet the multiple challenges created by data growth. It represents an evolution in the ability to store unstructured data, with near limitless scalability. Object storage also offers automatic geo-dispersed data protection and the ability to leverage commodity hardware, making it an ideal storage environment for a new generation of IT workloads.

To discover more about what attracts IT decision-makers to object storage, ESG also asked: “Which factors are responsible for your organization’s initial deployment or consideration of object storage technology?”

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As ESG reveals, across the wide variety of potential use cases for object storage, organizations are turning to the technology to help control TCO in the wake of rising digital content levels. But of those potential use cases, more organizations are looking to object storage as the foundation for the next generation of modern and cloud-based workloads.

Evaluating ECS Object Storage Advantages

ESG says that EMC’s object storage solution Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) delivers key features for object storage, such as:

  • Software-defined architecture leveraging commodity components
  • A strongly consistent, global scale-out namespace
  • In-place Hadoop analytics with HDFS support
  • Support for S3 and OpenStack APIs
  • Combined erasure-coded and replication-based protection
  • Built-in journaling, snapshots, and versioning
  • Multi-tenant architecture
  • Flexible deployment models
  • On-premises data security

Today’s Demanding Workloads Are Ripe For ECS

As ESG comments: The next generation of workloads is looking to be even more dependent on larger levels of digital content than ever before, and therefore needs the next generation of storage.” Highlighted workload areas where ECS can help improve TCO and ROI for organizations include:

  • Foundation for a cloud storage solution: ECS supports your deployment of a cloud infrastructure with its ability to dynamically allocate resources – and to report on how they are being leveraged. Its potential for nearly infinite scalability along with its ability to leverage commodity hardware help keep cloud infrastructure costs low.
  • Data lake for business analytics: ECS offers the ability to pool all your data into a single globally distributed repository for business analytics to derive new value, while its multi-protocol access reduces the need to move data back and forth for analysis.
  • Global content repository: Offering a single scalable, resilient, and cost-effective pool that can serve multiple application and content types, ECS enables all the content within the repository to be globally accessible by web, mobile, and cloud applications – at up to 65% lower cost than public cloud.
  • Universal object storage platform for Internet of Things (IoT) with in-place analytics: The geo-distributed strong consistency of ECS provides the ability to collect and store IoT sensor data in locations closer to the actual “things,” which improves performance and saves cost.
  • Modern application development: The scale and automatic geographic accessibility of ECS can provide significant benefits for developing your modern applications, especially those that require access to a large pool of read-only content.
  • Cold storage archive: ECS-based archiving controls the growth of unstructured data by migrating “cold” data off of high-performing and more expensive storage – while allowing for the data to remain online and accessible.

The Next-Generation Object Storage Platform

As ESG concludes: “Object storage is designed for and ideally suited for large content storage. EMC’s ECS solution, ultimately, offers a foundation upon which IT organizations can build out the next generation of applications and workloads. The next-generation datacenter will need a next-generation storage solution, like ECS.”

Read the full ESG Whitepaper for yourself: ”EMC Elastic Cloud Storage Offers Resilient Scalability for the New Generation of Workloads”, October 2015.

Learn more about object storage with EMC ECS.

EMC ECS software is available to download now and try free.

About the Author: Mark O'Connell