The data explosion is a well-known fact, and big data is having a profound impact not only on the volume of data but also the variety of data generated and the velocity at which it is being created, writes Kalvin Subbadu, sales manager: components at WD South Africa.
While this has many implications for the business world, one of the biggest challenges it creates is the storage of this information. Many users and enterprises are opting for cloud-based storage in order to cater to this ever-growing demand, and a variety of solutions, from Network Attached Storage (NAS) to data centres, have also become critical.
However, the reality is that whether you maintain data in house or in the cloud, somewhere there needs to be a physical hard drive capable of ensuring that data is maintained and is accessible whenever and wherever it is needed. The requirement for highly reliable, robust and performance-driven hard disk drive technology therefore lies at the heart of the big data and cloud movement.
The big data megatrend is often seen as affecting big business, and while this is true, big data affects all users, no matter how small, to some degree or another. Data volumes are growing at an unprecedented rate, which means that everyone, from the home user to the large enterprise, requires more storage than ever before. For the home and small business user, this is increasingly leading users to examine a NAS solution, while for larger enterprises, powerful data centres are often required. The cloud is another option for users of all sizes, and often solutions are a hybrid of premises-based and cloud-based storage solutions.
The one common denominator behind all of these is the hard drive, the physical device capable of storing data. Due to the always-on, always-available nature of the environment today, hard drives not only need to be able to store more data, they need to be more robust and more reliable as well. A hard drive is not just a hard drive – a desktop drive designed for a standard office worker will simply not function correctly when placed in a demanding storage environment such as NAS or a data centre. Choosing the right hard drive is therefore crucial in a big data-driven world, as data needs to be available on demand, fast, with zero downtime.
For home and small business NAS solutions, users should select a drive that has been purpose-built to suit this environment. Reliability is key, as is the ability for the drive to operate in a demanding, 24×7 operating environment. Drives selected for a NAS system also need to be compatible with the NAS enclosure, and should incorporate advanced technology to improve performance and reliability, protect data, and ensure cool, quiet and consistent operations.
When it comes to a data centre or enterprise storage, this multi-drive environment often presents unique challenges that require a high-quality solution designed for intense operating environments. Data centres employ specialised server and storage systems containing high-speed fans, densely packed drives and temperature fluctuations. Data centre and cloud hard drives therefore must be built to withstand harsh datacentre conditions – they need to compensate for multi-drive enclosures while ensuring consistent levels of performance, which requires high quality components and high reliability, along with support for a wide range of temperature and altitude ratings.
Data centres also typically require different fault-tolerance schemes like RAID and replication to ensure maximum performance, manageability and availability of a large amount of storage space. This requires storage devices that work flawlessly with hundreds of different controllers in both RAID and replication arrays, with higher error tolerances, tight performance variation, and SAS and SATA options for RAID systems. In addition, data centre and cloud storage systems use a wide variety of operating systems and applications that need to work flawlessly. Workloads are typically much greater than the workload of desktop or notebook computers and the storage devices must be able to handle workload-intensive applications 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This requires purpose-built storage devices that have undergone many hours of testing in different systems running various workloads, available in higher RPM models for demanding applications, and designed to operate almost continuously, both reading and writing.
When it comes to big data and the cloud, not all hard drives are created equal. Data is currency in today’s world, and ensuring it can be stored securely and accessed reliably is of the utmost importance. Hard drives need to be designed, manufactured and tested specifically to suite the demands of NAS, data centres or the cloud, to ensure the robustness and reliability required by these environments.
