Main functions that my storage should have

We are in the era of cognitive business, and the IT industry is being rearranged through the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence or Big Data. And in the immediate future, it will simply be unacceptable that an application, a product, a car, or even a meeting room does not have cognitive systems that allow it to understand, reason or learn.

In fact, if we interpret how new technologies are transforming the economy, we can say that the most precious resource is not oil, but data. But are we getting the value they really have? One impulse within our IT strategy is the need to create a competitive advantage with the value they generate, so creating and storing data is simply not enough. Technological innovation will allow us to obtain relevant information for decision making, create better consumer experiences, stay ahead of the competition and implement the best protection against fraud and security.

According to IDC, the amount of information created and stored by companies around the world is doubling every two years or so, while storage budgets are only 1.5% per year. As we can see, the real challenge is no longer to generate this information, but to have an infrastructure that allows us to manage these data growths, get the maximum performance and at the same time reduce storage costs. The solution to this problem can be found in the storage defined by software.

We can define software-defined storage as the virtualization of storage systems through software tools that are independent of the hardware and that will allow us to optimize and take full advantage of our infrastructure.

Virtualization allows us to deduplicate, compress, copy, replicate, move, migrate (to the hybrid cloud or to other storage systems) or tiering; and it will allow us to obtain a series of benefits including the following:

• More space in our storage booths achieving scalability.
• Greater effectiveness. What is called tiering, which are a set of storage techniques to get the most out of optimizing the investment. In this way, a set of data that we access more frequently may interest us to store it in a flash system that optimizes performance, while data that we do not access so actively may interest us to store them on hard drives or tape and are cheaper options. So we also reduce the cost of storage.
• Flexibility: Allowing services to be deployed both in the cloud and on proprietary hardware.
• Better data protection: From information leaks costing thousands of dollars, encryption and backup and disaster recovery systems.
• Greater control: applying rules and policies across different resources automatically, eliminating inefficiencies caused by silos or storage units that don't communicate well.
• Maximum use of data: Combine these drivers as cost reduction, more efficiency, agility in mobility, protection and adaptability of formats to provide a competitive advantage.

The digital transformation is a tsunami that affects each and every one of the companies and forces us to think and act differently than the traditional one. In the new digital economy, the world is governed by data, and in order to make the most of it we are going to need increasingly virtualized infrastructures where an increasingly multicloud environment is part of them.

In successive articles we will expand these functions to develop each one in depth.