"Each time I mention storage, a lot of people will think of hard disks," said Steven Law, the country manager of NetApp for Indonesia. "The fact is, the disks are only a component in a storage solution."
It is easy to understand why to the majority of users storage means the spinning platters inside the metal housing. Every PC, every notebook and even some smartphones have a hard disk. It is where the operating system, the application software and the data are stored.
In reality, storage -- especially as the term is used in the corporate and enterprise environments -- is more than just a place to keep all the 0s and 1s. It is the management of the gamut of storage devices.
These storage devices may be grouped into two types, namely, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN). "They do not speak the same language," Steven said during a recent press briefing in Jakarta.
NetApp, his company, is just one of the very few companies that provide storage solutions to corporate and large enterprises. The others, of course, are Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), EMC, IBM and Hewlett Packard.
As I wrote here in the past, the relationships between these companies are quite complex. They may compete in a certain market segment, but use each other's products to address the needs for a different segment. Some vendors are strong on the server side, while others may need the servers to make their solution work.
We all know the digital revolution has created a volume of data that continues to grow exponentially. While the capacity of hard disks has also grown substantially, it will never be able to cope with the data explosion. Therefore, a solution is required to manage the data, where it is stored, backed up, archived and so on.
Today, enterprises talk about petabytes of data. If we consider that one petabyte is equal to a bit more than one million gigabytes, we will have some idea of how huge is the volume of data that has to be managed, compared with the capacity of the hard disk that exists in your desktop PC.
"Keep in mind that one KB of data produced requires around 10 KB of supporting data, including the backup and archive," said Steven.
The more common thinking is to buy additional disks as the volume of data grows. However, this will lead to a chaotic storage ecosystem. More storage devices means more electricity, space, maintenance costs and so on.
It is easy to understand why to the majority of users storage means the spinning platters inside the metal housing. Every PC, every notebook and even some smartphones have a hard disk. It is where the operating system, the application software and the data are stored.
In reality, storage -- especially as the term is used in the corporate and enterprise environments -- is more than just a place to keep all the 0s and 1s. It is the management of the gamut of storage devices.
These storage devices may be grouped into two types, namely, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN). "They do not speak the same language," Steven said during a recent press briefing in Jakarta.
NetApp, his company, is just one of the very few companies that provide storage solutions to corporate and large enterprises. The others, of course, are Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), EMC, IBM and Hewlett Packard.
As I wrote here in the past, the relationships between these companies are quite complex. They may compete in a certain market segment, but use each other's products to address the needs for a different segment. Some vendors are strong on the server side, while others may need the servers to make their solution work.
We all know the digital revolution has created a volume of data that continues to grow exponentially. While the capacity of hard disks has also grown substantially, it will never be able to cope with the data explosion. Therefore, a solution is required to manage the data, where it is stored, backed up, archived and so on.
Today, enterprises talk about petabytes of data. If we consider that one petabyte is equal to a bit more than one million gigabytes, we will have some idea of how huge is the volume of data that has to be managed, compared with the capacity of the hard disk that exists in your desktop PC.
"Keep in mind that one KB of data produced requires around 10 KB of supporting data, including the backup and archive," said Steven.
The more common thinking is to buy additional disks as the volume of data grows. However, this will lead to a chaotic storage ecosystem. More storage devices means more electricity, space, maintenance costs and so on.
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