• Tech & Trends

Object Storage Comes of Age

By Patricia Harris

IT organizations looking to support their top IT initiatives while threading the needle of saving money (and doing more with less) are looking at object storage. Once just relegated as an archive or tier 2 solution, object storage is now being used to support new use cases and higher performance workloads. In fact, 80% of organizations worldwide believe object storage supports their top IT initiatives.1 (Figure 1)

Because object storage is a proven, mature technology already in use in the enterprise, it is not a big leap to realize the value object storage provides in supporting IT initiatives. Object storage solutions can increase data accessibility for both regulatory compliance and data analytics by tapping into unstructured data, unlocking the value of that data. Unstructured data, according to Harvard Business Review, accounts for 80% of total data in an organization with less than 1% being used.2 In fact, just a 10% increase in data accessibility will result in more than $65 million in additional net income for the typical Fortune 1000 company, according to a recent Forbes article.3 More data, plus faster access means more timely and accurate decision making, which leads to improved productivity and the ability to innovate faster while maintaining your budget: win-win-win-win.

Figure 1. More organizations are using object storage for tier 1 workloads. Source: IDC Infobrief

Hitachi Vantara recognizes the value object storage holds for IT organizations. Our Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) can support new workloads with performance optimized configurations and supports the need for cloud storage, workload optimization, next generation file services and backup to object storage in one solution. And having access to more data means having access to more value.

In addition, Hitachi Vantara has partnered with WekaIO to offer a software defined, NVMe native, parallel file system to meet our customers’ most data-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing. The solution provided through this OEM partnership is unique in that we are the only vendor able address today’s most demanding workloads with a fully integrated, cost optimized, end-to-end solution based on Weka’s category leading WekaFS and our category leading HCP object storage.

Our expanded portfolio of unstructured data storage solutions will enable organizations to span from clouds and data centers to the edge and across end user devices, and offer a single vendor solution to optimize costs, reduce risk of data loss and compliance failures, and provide users and applications with the right level of access and performance for any workload from archives to analytics.

  1. IDC Info Brief. “Object Storage: Foundational Technology for Top IT Initiatives.” April 2019.
  2. https://hbr.org/2017/05/whats-your-data-strategy
  3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2019/03/28/the-four-key-pillars-to-fostering-a-data-driven-culture/#4d3999667d90
  4. Press Release: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/newsroom-hvtv/in-the-press/2020/gl200714.html

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