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We are seeing an explosion in the growth of data today. Not surprisingly, many industry experts believe that we have entered a new era of big data. Along with accelerating growth of new data, the composition of new data is also changing significantly from traditional structured, block data to much more unstructured, file-based data. More than 85% of new storage capacity installed in organizations around the world is for file-based data.
This new world of big data is introducing major challenges for enterprise IT managers and significant opportunities for businesses across all industry segments. To deliver the optimal storage platform for big data, a storage system must provide:
While there are certain similarities with the needs of vertical industries’ big data, traditional Enterprise IT has its own set of business drivers that create a unique set of storage requirements including:
Today, the clear delineations that have existed between big data requirements and enterprise IT requirements have now blurred to the point that they are no longer distinguishable. The simple fact is that these two worlds are rapidly converging, creating a need for a fundamentally different way to meet the storage needs that enterprises will have going forward. To address these needs, organizations require an enterprise scale-out storage infrastructure that can meet the combined needs of this new world of big data and traditional Enterprise IT. We call this the “scale-out” imperative.