Modern file storage should enhance the productivity and efficiency of data innovators/managers and the ROI of capital investments. HPE GreenLake for File Storage delivers on both counts. Learn how.
–By David Yu, HPE Storage Product Marketing
Your most valuable assets are your people and your data. By people, we mean both users of IT services – your subject-matter experts, data scientists, and line-of-business application owners – and the IT staff that provides those services. To truly achieve your digital transformation goals and seize competitive advantage, you need to optimize the interaction between your data managers/innovators and your data resources, making both highly productive and efficient.
Data stakeholders perceive productivity and efficiency differently
Users of IT services and IT staff can have very different perspectives on productivity and efficiency. Consider these three groups:
- Subject-matter experts and data scientists want to set up and run their jobs easily and drive faster time to insight. They don’t want to be hindered by file storage, but sometimes they’ll resort to using complicated file systems to get the performance they need. This group often ends up doing a lot of tuning and setup work to run their jobs, which inhibits productivity. They don’t really care who provides them with file storage, be it the line-of-business application owner, IT staff, or public cloud, as long as it’s fast and simple to use.
- Line-of-business application owners want to get their apps up and running. They don’t care if there are storage silos if they achieve their goal. They will sometimes obtain their own storage resources or even use public cloud despite its tradeoffs to speed up progress, with the result that your organization is stuck with storage silos from various application areas. From an IT point of view, this is a huge management problem.
- IT staff want to keep users happy, but they also care about eliminating storage silos. They want to be able to orchestrate file data simply and efficiently across the board – including storing, managing, protecting, and tracking data – with low overhead. Their worst nightmare is data stored across silos with no one really aware of what and where all the data is. This can happen, for instance, when key data managers and data innovators who generate, accumulate, and use data leave the organization. In this case, IT ends up trying to figure out what data is stored in the various silos left behind.
Boosting the productivity and efficiency of your teams
One of the key strengths of HPE GreenLake for File Storage is that it enhances productivity and efficiency for all your data managers and data innovators. Application owners and users get simple setup and fast job completion, with easy file share creation and data sharing across a global namespace for each storage cluster. They no longer need to manage file storage infrastructure the way they did previously to get the file storage performance their applications need. And they aren’t burdened by cumbersome, legacy file systems that require technical expertise, involve intricate setup processes, and result in storage silos. Consequently, you get more productivity and efficiency out of your highly compensated subject matter experts as they save valuable time and effort and focus on their actual work.
Meanwhile, the IT team can leverage radically simple, unified file and storage management via a single cloud console, and automated, nondisruptive upgrades that keep users happy. With the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, IT can eliminate complex management, storage infrastructure silos, poor performance scaling, and low productivity from edge to cloud – while modernizing data management via a comprehensive suite of cloud data services and a unified operating experience. Both IT staff and data managers/consumers can leverage a self-service cloud experience, accessible from anywhere, on any device, which frees them to work on strategic initiatives rather than being weighed down by day-to-day operations.
Optimizing your capital investments
In addition to highly productive data teams, you also want maximum productivity, efficiency, and ROI from your capital equipment investments. With HPE GreenLake for File Storage, you can flexibly scale performance and capacity independently as your needs grow, making your storage infrastructure future-proof. You can efficiently scale up and out by adding controller and storage nodes as needed, instead of getting another box or appliance that sacrifices flexible and efficient scaling while potentially leaving you with underutilized or imbalanced compute and storage resources.
Let’s look at a few more advantages of HPE GreenLake for File Storage:
Investment protection
An architecture designed for exabyte scale ensures you have plenty of headroom, which is critical for large data lakes, as migrating tens of PBs of data every 4–5 years is cost-prohibitive. Built on HPE Alletra Storage MP modular hardware, the architecture of HPE GreenLake for File Storage eliminates hardware silos, islands of data, and migration issues, providing an infinite data lifecycle that is transparent to applications. Easily maintain storage infrastructure and make non-disruptive upgrades. Enjoy investment protection and maximum ROI with data-in-place upgrades.
SSD longevity
With data foresight technology for all-NVMe storage, HPE GreenLake for File Storage delivers efficiencies for flash longevity. The system learns how data is laid down during ingestion into the metadata layer and takes advantage of being able to see the full data estate. The foresight engine intelligently classifies data as it flows through the system and places it in stripes according to life expectancy. Data ages out of stripes at the same time, eliminating write amplification and enabling years of SSD longevity.
Efficient data protection
HPE GreenLake for File Storage features a new erasure code algorithm that rebuilds a failed SSD without reading the entire very large stripe that the system uses. The algorithm maximizes capacity efficiency without sacrificing fast rebuild times and includes a Storage Class Memory buffer for large stripes. The new erasure code uses parity drives as a “force multiplier” in rebuild times, so only a quarter of the drives must be read to rebuild a stripe. This results in a very low overhead of around 2.7%. Along with high efficiency in the way that data is laid down, you also have the full performance of the system at the same time. It’s the best of both worlds.
Superior data reduction
HPE GreenLake for File Storage further increases ROI with highly-efficient data reduction that uses the unique Similarity algorithm. Similarity is important when you’re looking for data reduction in file data. Whereas many all-flash block systems rely on compression and deduplication and work well in environments for virtual machines (where you have many copies of operating systems or multiple copies of the same databases for QA and testing), in the unstructured world of files, there is a lot of data that will be similar but not identical.
Compression is fine-grained but local: you are reducing redundancy over a small piece of data. It’s also very computationally intensive. Deduplication is global over a large amount of data, but very coarse. Data is broken up into chunks of the same block size, and the system looks for exact matches. Similarity looks for data that is similar but not identical on both a global and fine-grained basis.
Take the example of DNA data. A DNA strand will have information that is mostly the same, but there will be differences at various points of uniqueness. With an algorithm looking for identical matches, that would be a mismatch. However, Similarity will spot blocks of data that are mostly the same, compress them together, track the changes between them, and store only what is common. This gives you the best of both worlds from compression, which is fine-grained but local, and deduplication, which is global but coarse.
To illustrate Similarity’s superior data reduction, here is a before and after comparison of a data footprint using Similarity vs. compression and deduplication:
Before
After
Example savings from Similarity: Up to 2:1 reduction for life sciences data; 3:1 for pre-reduced backups, pre-compressed log files, and HPC and animation data; and 8:1 for uncompressed time-series data.1
With investment protection, SSD longevity, efficient data protection, and superior data reduction, HPE GreenLake for File Storage delivers impressive efficiency, productivity, and high ROI from your capital investments.
Enhanced productivity and efficiency from human and capital resources
When considering file storage IT infrastructure, you absolutely need to secure performance at scale for today’s data-intensive workloads. But you also need to think about two additional factors: First, how will your solution enhance the productivity and efficiency of your valuable human resources across the board, from line-of-business application owners and subject-matter experts to IT staff? For that, you need efficient file storage infrastructure and simplified management. And second, you need to make sure that your capital investments will give you a high ROI.
As you evaluate and decide on your file storage strategy and investments, it’s important to have a comprehensive view that accounts for the effective utilization of all your resources, human and infrastructure alike. HPE GreenLake for File Storage is designed to deliver enhanced productivity and efficiency on both fronts.
Read the first two blogs in this HPE GreenLake for File Storage series:
- A cloud management experience for file storage minus security risks or trade-offs
- A file storage architecture for enterprise performance at scale
To learn more
Watch this CIO webinar on demand: How to effectively store, manage, and protect data across your hybrid cloud
Meet Storage Experts blogger David Yu, HPE Storage Product Marketing
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