The Basics of Backing Up
In today’s fast-paced corporate landscape, unexpected incidents such as unintentional device damages or misplacements can lead to significant data losses. Such setbacks not only jeopardise the retention of invaluable corporate records but can also have profound operational implications. Recognizing the criticality of data backup is paramount in the business realm.
Yet, with the plethora of backup methodologies available in 2023, navigating the best fit can be complex. The ever-increasing file sizes, especially of multimedia content, pose challenges to many traditional storage avenues on physical drives. This is where innovative solutions like Software Defined Storage come into play, offering a tailored response to these contemporary challenges.
Traditional hardware centric storage, such as dedicated storage appliances and NAS, have simply hit a wall. They’re unable to handle efficiently the massive volume of data that modern corporations require. They have a need for elastic scalability and truly can’t manage the dynamic workloads of digital businesses, big data, and the demands of the cloud.
Conversely, software defined storage – also known as SDS – provides a radically different approach. Storage resources are decoupled from hardware, aggregated into a giant pool, and then distributed dynamically to the applications and users that need them. This skyrockets scalability, maximises hardware utilization, and costs therefore plummet.
Software defined storage achieves this through the use protocols such as Simple Storage Service (S3). It stores provided data as objects, which includes the file itself and any metadata, in buckets. All of the objects, and the data within them, are contained within the buckets.
Because of this structure, S3 can provide industry-leading scalability, security, data availability, and performance. It also protects data in a wide range of use cases: from data backups, to data lakes and analytics, to your archives, media storage, and IOT devices.
Hence, when you as a customer opt for a cloud services provider, you need to ensure that your data would be stored on a software defined platform other than traditional hardware centric storage. If your current Cloud Services Provider (CSP) does not yet have a clear roadmap to migrate his storage to a software defined solution, you should seriously consider shifting provider.
Melita Business’s SmartCloud storage solution is powered by HPE’s Scality. Whether you’re backing up your Virtual Machines, Physical Servers or your Microsoft365 tenant, with Melita Business you’ll have your mind at rest that your data is being stored on a software defined storage solution in Malta.
The features of Scality are manifold. There is virtually unlimited scalability with the largest choice of compatible Independent Software Vendors (ISV) applications. Scality provides Data Assurance not just in the petabytes, but all the way to zetabytes. Scality also has near 100% uptime, guaranteed, thanks to its unique approach to software-defined storage. This includes as “shared nothing” architecture with no single point of failure, automated self-healing, and erasure coding. Scality is also easily integrated using S3 API’s with ISV’s such as VEEAM, AcronisCommvault and more.
If that wasn’t enough, Scality provides on-demand scaling of capacity and performance. When you need to grow, just add more industry-standard x86 hardware – the latest, fastest, densest models of your choice. Scality handles the rest by automatically rebalancing data and scaling the performance to match.
Using Scality can also lead to spectacular savings. When affordable x86 servers replace proprietary NAS appliances, the financial results are predictable: up to 80% reduction in storage costs.
Scality and software-defined storage has so much to offer and are improvements over traditional hardware centric storage are self-evident. It’s the natural choice in this ever-complex landscape of modern backups solutions. Providing empowered performance, heightened security, and the potential for vast savings on storage costs, Scality is a straightforward data storage upgrade for any modern business.