Centralized data centers have long been the mainstay of modern enterprises. With centralized data management, secure data storage, disaster recovery, and information assurance features, they have successfully served business applications and users alike.
However, with the exponential rise in storage requirements and the corresponding need to scale capacities, many on-prem data centers have either already hit the physical limits or are beginning to do so.
Typically, the answer lies in cloud-based storage, which has consequently seen a rapidly growing adoption among enterprises across sectors. While that has served the elasticity needs of enterprise data storage, newer challenges have come to the fore and grown in significance. Notably, unstructured data has seen an unprecedented rise in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of R&D, marketing, and customer data in the form of images, audios, and videos. Also, with high-definition and 4k imagery fast becoming a norm, enterprises’ storage demands are quickly exhausting their existing capacities. IDC’s Global StorageSphere data indicates that, over the long term, the installed base of enterprise storage capacity is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.8% during 2019–24, resulting in an installed base of storage capacity of 13.2ZB in 2024, compared with 5.8ZB in 2019, thus more than doubling over the forecast period.
Enterprises are finding it challenging to efficiently and affordably store and manage this volume of data. Object-based storage has emerged as the preferred method for data archiving and backup. It offers a level of scalability not possible with traditional file- or block-based storage, handling volumes on the order of terabytes, petabytes, and even more.
Storage architectures such as data lakes are well-suited to meeting needs of today’s enterprises. Cloud-based data lakes are even better, particularly when coupled with agile access-and-storage algorithms.
IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) is designed grounds-up to meet these very needs of modern-day enterprises that not just need to focus on business growth but also keep their costs under check, given the intense competitive pressures they live with. With built-in high-speed file transfer capabilities, cross-region offerings, and integrated services, IBM COS is an ideal solution for storing, archiving, backing up, and managing high volumes of static or unstructured data—reliably, efficiently, and affordably.
IBM COS is a data lake solution in the cloud that takes care of diverse storage-and-access needs of enterprises in an ultra-efficient and cost-sensitive manner. Due thought has been applied into its algorithms to ensure that not all storage is treated and priced in a blanket fashion. Data that needs to be archived or data that is not accessed frequently are categorized accordingly and stored with lower priced objects.
Further, if the volume of data with high-availability requirements increases in the event of a surge, IBM COS has a built-in elasticity to scale up the resources. As soon as the surge gets over, COS is equally capable of scaling down the resources, so much so that even zero resource allocation is possible. These mechanisms help CIOs and their IT teams ensure that optimum use of their budgets is attained.
Incidentally, IBM is offering enterprises a USD1, 500 credit to be applied over a 90-day period, to store their data in IBM COS. This is a monthly equivalent of 10TBs of storage, 1 million write requests, 10 million read requests and 2TBs of public egress (if downloading data is needed). These numbers can vary based on unique needs, such as how much data is stored, downloaded and how often it is accessed.
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