Data determines the winners and losers in the digital age
If we examine the top trends many organizations are focused on today—harnessing big data and analytics, embracing the Internet of Things, investing in artificial intelligence—they all have a common foundation. Data.
It’s data that powers digital transformation and the digital economy. The organizations best positioned to win in this data era are those who have superior strategies for collecting and harnessing the untapped potential locked away in this ever-growing ocean of data.
Unstructured data driving data sprawl
Unstructured data is driving much of this growth. Gartner analysts estimated that nearly 80% of the data footprint for an organization is unstructured¹, and that enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object storage from what they had in 2019.² Adding to this complex equation is the fact that unstructured data growth is not consigned to the core data center, but is spreading across geographically dispersed and edge locations. According to Gartner, by 2022, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, up from less than 10% in 2019.³
The end result is a growing, complex and increasingly siloed data landscape that must be managed with relatively flat IT budgets. This reality decreases the pace of innovation across teams and hampers their ability to collaborate effectively as more organizations are forced to focus on keeping the lights on, rather than driving real business value.
PowerScale and DataIQ: Designed for the data era
Today, we introduced Dell PowerScale, a new family of unstructured data storage systems that builds on the legacy that Isilon and OneFS have carved out in scale-out NAS. Customers can deploy PowerScale across edge, core and cloud environments, empowering organizations to capture data, wherever it’s being generated, at scale. But unstructured data storage alone isn’t enough to establish a strategy which puts data first. To truly solve the challenges detailed, organizations require tools that help them discover all the unstructured data strewn across the enterprise landscape, understand its characteristics and act on novel insights to accelerate the data lifecycle and optimize the environment.
Enter Dell DataIQ.
DataIQ is multi-purpose dataset management software which delivers a unique method for managing unstructured data stored across multiple, heterogenous file and object storage platforms either on-premises or in the cloud. An advanced filesystem scan, index, classification and fast search platform, it provides single-pane-of-glass visibility into all unstructured data assets under management. This includes Dell unstructured storage products such as the new PowerScale family (including Isilon), ECS, PowerStore and Unity. It’s also capable of providing a holistic data view across third-party and public cloud environments. DataIQ’s core dataset management capabilities are included with PowerScale, so customers can quickly start capturing value from their unstructured storage.
Controlling the data lifecycle and accelerating time-to-insights
DataIQ helps control the data lifecycle by giving both IT and business users a toolset which enables them track data through its lifespan, ensuring the location of the data is known, determining if it is stored on the right platform and if it is accessible by the right stakeholders. Using custom tagging functionality, users can also logically group data from disparate systems together and manage it according to relevant business context. This capability is useful for correlating related folder and file assets which might be stored on different volumes, across multiple platforms, according to how actual project teams are organized within a business. Summary reports can subsequently be built which display total storage consumption by project name, team designation, or even project stage of completion, rather than being limited to reports based on simple file extensions.
DataIQ also enables users to move data on-demand via its plugin ecosystem. This gives IT and content creators a means to transfer data to the right storage platform and performance tier, improving collaboration and meeting TCO objectives.
By empowering employees to rapidly locate data, organize it based on unique context and move it as needed, organizations accelerate time-to-insights and can make smarter decisions on how data should be moved through the lifecycle. From creation to analysis, deletion to rehydration, DataIQ speeds time-to-value at each phase.
Using DataIQ, organizations can break down data silos, make more informed decisions about data assets, speed up dataset management and unlock the potential hidden away in their unstructured data.
¹ Gartner, Inc. “Market Guide for File Analysis Software” by Alan Dayley, Guido De Simoni, Julian Tirsu, Garth Landers, March-Antoine Meunier, March 27, 2018
² Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage(source: Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” by Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, Chandra Mukhyala, September 30, 2019
³ Gartner Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations for 2020, December 2019
