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Storage Tiers and the Future of Data Storage

Apr 25, 2017 1:03:14 PM | Storage

Last year, Jeskell’s Director of Storage Systems Practice, Russ Schneider, sat down with Jason Fornicola of the DC-based Federal News Radio for an interview about "The Future of Data Storage."Future of Data Storage RS v2.gif

Here is a segment of Russ’s comments about storage tiers:

“Over the last 5 years, federal IT spending has decreased 2.4 percent annually. Faced with that drop in funds available for infrastructure, federal agencies are now under tremendous pressure to secure data, to store data, and to analyze data.

And nobody really has their house 100% in order.

A recent survey by the president’s council for science and policy determined that fewer than 6% of civilian agencies, and 2.4% of defense agencies, actually felt that they were doing an adequate job addressing their data [storage] and data security needs.

So, faced with that problem; and faced with the fact that unstructured data—which is the data that everybody wants to analyze today, to spot terrorists, to determine who’s cheating on their Medicare—faced with that unstructured data, which now represents about 31% of total federal data that’s being stored; that data is growing at six times the rate of structured data.

So all of a sudden, we have this explosion of 2.5 billion bytes of new data that are being created every day. And that data is being created faster than agencies can figure out how to store it; how to secure it; at what appropriate storage tier it needs to be stored on.

And I liken this to being in your house, which is a good analogy: I’m sure that you have things around your house—like a deed to a car—that should be in a safe deposit box, but it’s not. And that’s analogous to the type of data that really should be secured and encrypted [in the most secure storage tier], and have very restricted access to that type of data.

Other things that you use every day, like your toothbrush, needs to be at hand where you can get to it quickly. And that’s analogous to data like transactional records that are used every day to manage, run, and operate the agencies. 

And we have data that might be needed occasionally, and that’s analogous to things like a serving plate you might need to take out when company comes. You need to store those things, and that type of data, where you don’t need to get it immediately, but you do need to get it in a reasonable amount of time, when it is needed.  And that type of data needs to be stored [in a storage tier] where it might take a minute or two to retrieve that data. A good example might be somebody who’s gonna ask for their social security record—it’s acceptable that that’s not available for 20 seconds.

But when somebody puts a card into a machine, they expect a screen to come up in less than a second, and if they don’t, they’re troubled.

Then we have the other type of data, which is analogous to the things that you really should clean out of your garage! That you should put in boxes, and you should put labels on them, and probably store them up in the attic. And that type of data storage is analogous to archival storage. Every agency has data around that really should be stored in containers like that with labels on it [the lowest possible storage tier]; it’s never going to be accessed again.”

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Russell T. Schneider

To watch the full interview, click here:

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