As a data processing center manager, you know that your storage infrastructure is one of the most important and overlooked parts of your entire operation.
While everyone pays attention to flashy new hosts and the latest networking gear, the humble storage server in the back of the rack often gets taken for granted. But you know that when disaster strikes and your systems go down, it will be how you have your data stored that determines whether or not you can get back up and running in time to save your bacon.
Today, we’re going to talk about 9 ways the right storage server can go from being an afterthought to becoming your data center’s secret weapon.
1. Backup Saves the Day by Letting You Roll Back to Earlier Times
One of the biggest advantages of having a robust and reliable storage server is the ability to roll back to earlier points in time when disaster strikes.
Whether it’s a user error like accidentally deleting an important file or folder, ransomware encrypting your critical systems, or hardware failure bringing systems down, the storage host lets you restore earlier versions to get your environment back in working order.
A good storage system with robust versioning capabilities can save you hours or even days of troubleshooting or rebuilding time by letting you simply roll back to how things were before the incident occurred.
2. Snapshot Your Data So You Can Recover Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Taking regular snapshots of your storage volumes is one of the best ways to protect your data and minimize downtime from any kind of outage or corruption issue.
With snapshots, the storage server is constantly taking incremental block-level backups of your data so that any given point in time can be reverted to with just a few clicks. This means if a disk fails or a folder gets deleted, you may be back up and running in minutes instead of hours by recovering from the most recent snapshot.
3. Replication Keeps Your Data Safe Even When the Ship Goes Down
Ensuring you have copies of critical data in multiple locations is Storage Hosting 101 for disaster recovery. A good storage host allows you to easily replicate datasets across sites so that if a whole data center goes offline, you still have live access to applications and files from remote locations.
Real-time replication maintains second copies of storage volumes at a follow-the-sun DR site, keeping your business online even when natural disasters or power outages take out your primary infrastructure.
4. Deduplication Saves You Space and Money by Finding Duplicate Data to Zap
One of the hidden benefits of advanced storage systems is deduplication, the process of identifying duplicate data blocks and storing only one unique copy. This allows a storage server to slash the physical capacity needed over time by avoiding storing copies of the same files. Deduplication finds identical blocks of data, whether within files on the same volume or across your whole dataset.Â
5. Compression Packs More Data Into Each Block
Similar to deduplication, compression looks for patterns in your data to represent it more efficiently using fewer bits.
- It identifies redundant patterns and common symbols that can be substituted with shorter code representations.
- On the storage host, compression runs constantly in the background at the block level, allowing more data to be packed into each physical allocation unit.
- This effectively increases the usable capacity of each drive and its volume.
Estimates show 2-to-1 compression is common depending on your data types, meaning you get twice as much logical capacity from the same physical disks.
6. Thin Provisioning Lets You Allocate More Than You’re Using
With thin provisioning, your storage host allocates logical volumes and LUNs that are larger than the actual physical capacity being used at a given time. This allows your data center to assign generous amounts of capacity up front without using the full physical space.
Say you provision a 2TB volume but are only using 500GB; the storage system only allocates what’s needed from the pool. This lets you plan for future growth without being constrained. If something needs changing, you can grow allocated volumes non-disruptively.
7. Automated Tiering Puts Hot Data on Fast Storage and Cold Data on Capacity Drives
As data ages out of hot primary use, it makes sense to migrate it from higher-performing but more expensive flash or SSD storage to cheaper yet still reliable capacity-optimized HDDs. A tiered storage architecture with automated data placement policies based on access patterns ensures your most active data resides on lower latency tiers while less frequently accessed blocks are tied down over time.
This optimizes performance for your high IOPS applications without paying a premium for all data to sit on flash. Tiering maximizes usage of each storage type—from fast to high capacity—to save costs while maintaining service levels.
8. Inline Deduplication and Compression Boost Flash Performance for Consolidating Workloads
As more applications are virtualized or containerized, there is a trend toward consolidating diverse workloads on shared infrastructure. But this can challenge the performance of flash storage, which needs to satisfy varying IOPs and throughput needs simultaneously.
Inline deduplication and compression preprocess data before it ever hits flash, reducing the physical space needed. This boosts the effective capacity and IOPS of each SSD, allowing more workloads to coexist without performance impacts.
9. Policy Automation Takes Over Routine Tasks So You Can Focus on Strategic Work
Once configured, a smart storage server can be programmed to automatically carry out repetitive daily, weekly and monthly operations like backups, snapshots, replications and tiering based on set policies.Â
- This frees up valuable administrator time. Maintenance tasks like capacity planning, monitoring and reporting are also simplified through automated analytics.
- New volumes or datastores can be provisioned on-demand through self-service portals without heavy lifting from storage teams.
Automation streamlines storage operations so limited resources can concentrate on more strategic infrastructure projects rather than manual “grunt work.”.
In Summary
As you can see, an enterprise-grade storage server is about much more than just capacity and performance. It can revolutionize how you protect, recover, optimize and manage your data center environment. With the right features leveraged properly, storage moves from a commodity component to a strategic asset that saves you time, money and headaches every single day.
