Small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) have variable data requirements and limited resources to address them. This makes the acquisition of an efficient yet cost effective solution for data storage a critical decision for them. Conventionally, cost effective cloud based service is recommended for SMBs. However, there are merits to other solutions as well; especially the hybrid data storage solution.
What is Hybrid Data Storage Solution?
Hybrid data storage solutions can be divided into two types. One is cloud based hybrid data storage solution. This hybrid solution facilitates data storage into public and private clouds. The second kind of hybrid storage solution enables on-premises data storage and data storage in the cloud.
The cloud based hybrid data storage offers two major benefits:
- Access to cost effective public cloud data storage tiers.
- Access to failover services of the private cloud.
Failover services are vendor specific, so it is better to gain in-depth information about services before acquiring them.
The second kind of hybrid storage presents an interesting array of merits. SMBs can:
- Acquire reduced latency & high IOPS compute capacity.
- On-premises & offsite data storage.
- Access cost effective public cloud data storage tiers.
The mix of on-premises storage appliances with the cloud allows SMBs to tap into the benefits of on-premise appliances and the cloud simultaneously. This provides the opportunity to develop a cost effective solution that can address a number of data requirements while adding value to the data.
For instance, SMBs can acquire a scale out NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliance with cloud connect services. The enterprise can locally store data in the appliance and extend the data storage to the cloud. As the appliance can support high IOPS requirements, enterprises don’t have to worry about latency. SMBs can effectively use the on-premise appliance to store their hot data and use the cloud connect services to archive their data on the cloud. So the hot data is effectively stored and is highly available without any delay; and the archive data is stored in a cost effective way as well.
For data storage, this combination of NAS appliance and cloud connect services is high efficient. If SMBs already own an appliance that do not offer cloud connect services, then a cloud gateway appliance can be used to access the cloud.
What makes Hybrid Data Storage different from other storage solutions?
Other data storage solutions include:
- On-premises data storage.
- Cloud based data storage.
The best thing about on-premises data storage appliances they can support IOPS intensive workloads efficiently. Latency is exceptionally reduced due to the fact that the infrastructure is accessible via the local network. The downside is the astronomical cost implications. According to studies, archival and cold data makes up a huge portion of an enterprise data. And it is very costly to store this infrequently accessed data on local infrastructure.
Cloud services are pretty amazing and enterprises globally are already using them. The cloud is cost effective and secure for enterprise data. Not to mention, the cloud also offers different storage tiers for each kind of data. This enables enterprises to add value to their data. The downside however, is that for data requiring frequent access it exhibits more latency than on-premises infrastructure.
Hybrid data storage taps into the benefits of both these storage solutions. This allows SMBs to gain access to the benefits of both worlds. That is the fundamental difference between a hybrid data storage solution.
Conclusion
SMBs need cost effective data storage solutions for their enterprise data. Using an on-premise storage solution is good for IOPS intensive workloads but tends to be costly while cloud based storage solutions are cost effective but not exactly built for frequently accessed data and IOPS intensive workloads. Hybrid data storage solutions combines the capabilities of both enterprise data storage solutions to facilitate efficient data storage. Using hybrid data storage solutions, enterprises can also devise an effective backup and disaster recovery plan to ensure data recovery and high availability.
