Comparing these two solutions side by side for 1 petabyte of usable storage, dispersal requires 40% of the raw storage of RAID 6 and replication. This translates to 40% less hardware, floor space, power and cooling. Factor in less time of a storage administrator as well, and it is easy to see how much more cost-effective dispersal is for large-scale systems.
Face it -- many executives fear the resume-generating event of having to admit the system they are responsible for has failed and is expensive and impossibly difficult to migrate to a more efficient storage solution.
Some executives may be in denial though -- "My storage is only 40 terabytes, and I have it under control, thank you."
Consider a storage system growing at the average rate of 10 times in five years per IDC's estimation. A system of 40TB today will be 400TB in five years, and 4 petabytes within just 10 years. This illustrates that a system that in the terabyte range that is currently using RAID will most likely start to fail within the executive's tenure.
Forward-thinking executives will make a strategic shift to dispersal to realize greater data protection as well as substantial cost savings for digital content storage.
Bellanca is a founder and the director of marketing and communications for Cleversafe, which offers resilient storage solutions ideally suited for storage clouds and massive digital archives. For organizations that value assurance in confidentiality, data integrity and limitless availability, Cleversafe provides information resiliency built directly into the storage system DNA.
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