Your company has a need to efficiently process, analyze and store the massive amounts of data you are collecting. You need the technology and solutions to manage this growth. You are also aware that almost all architectural decisions have a lasting impact on longevity, performance and return on investment (ROI).
It is very important for your company to implement viable data storage architecture. Swiftway understands this and has the wherewithal to advice your company on data storage, do the actual setup and we have the experts to manage it appropriately.
There is a lot to consider when contemplating a data storage solution and we encourage our clients to think about them. A properly planned storage infrastructure should meet both your current and future needs.
Scalability is the ability of a storage solution, to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. Swiftway supports the 2 most common ways to scale storage arrays.
Scale vertically (scale up) A single large storage node that can accommodate 36 hard drives of 3.5 Inch each or a node that can scale to up to 72 hard drives of 2.5 Inch depending upon your storage performance requirements. This solution will work very well for future storage requirements that are expected to stay well under 50TB of redundant data.
Scale horizontally (scale out) The ability to add multiple (hundreds of) nodes to a storage solution. More complex from a software and management point of view, but far more versatile this solution offers a very high performance and the ability to expand your storage platform to Petabytes of data storage.
Data reduction techniques are applied where the goal is to aggregate or amalgamate the information contained in large data sets into manageable (smaller) information nuggets. Data reduction allows you to store more data on a storage array at the expense of performance.
Data storage performance planning, monitoring and troubleshooting may be as much art as science. The most common locations for data storage performance bottlenecks and problems are the front-end ports into a storage array, the controllers and the disk drives.
A performance benchmark of how many IOPS the storage device generates per dollar is probably of more value than how many total IOPS a storage system can produce. A full SSD solution provides a high cost per capacity, but when analyzed on a cost/performance basis, however, SSD's emerge as the superior value in the market today. Costs as low as 14 cents per IOPS (I/O Per Second) make SSD's a simple choice when performance for that small amount of prioritized data is necessary. There are also hybrid solutions available to boost performance. Inexpensive SATA hard drives can be combined with SSD Caching technology to create a large and fast but inexpensive storage solution. Companies that need a lot of performance from their storage arrays, may look at SSD caching, Fast 15k RPM SAS hard drives or even go for a full SSD storage array. Another proven method to increase performance is to scale out rather than scale up.