The new year brings with it a variety of new possibilities, and, in turn, ongoing challenges. For database storage, maintaining an enterprise’s database environment remains a key responsibility for any business.
Nihal Mirashi, principal solutions marketing manager at Pure Storage, and Marsha Pierce, global practice lead for databases at Pure Storage, joined DBTA’s webinar, Navigating Database Storage Challenges in 2024, to explore a variety of methods and best practices for scaling storage infrastructure to align with the growing demands of data, both as it relates to handling its growth and optimizing its performance.
Mirashi explained that the trends for 2024 are not necessarily new but have remained significant and will continue to do so in the year ahead and beyond.
The first of these trends is that our world is outcome-based and driven by data—which is further complicated by the fact that exponential data growth is projected to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025, according to Statista. Data professionals are then left to deal with both this massive growth and harnessing its power to produce positive business outcomes.
Mirashi pointed to another related trend, where the automation of database operations is driving the modification of roles. These “data-centric” roles have transformed the database administrator to the data architect, the data analyst to the business intelligence engineer, and the data quality engineer to the data scientist.
Ultimately, this evolution of roles will necessitate more responsibility and complexity for each professional to grapple with.
As evident in 2023, the rapid growth of AI is disrupting every industry and will only continue to do so in 2024.
“Pretty much every organization out there is looking at adopting AI,” said Mirashi. “This is going to be a huge disruptor in our daily lives and how we adapt to it as we move forward.”
These trends all culminate in a huge impact on data infrastructures, especially as it relates to data mobility, data performance, data protection, and hybrid cloud success.
“The infrastructure is going to play an even more important role, especially when it comes to storing this data and doing things with this data,” said Mirashi. “The databases are going to be central to all of this, and with that comes the challenges for the underlying storage infrastructure.”
Pierce asserted that Pure Storage’s approach to these challenges accommodates the DBA’s evolution and newfound alignment to CIO projects, having to be more concerned with the business than ever. Pure Storage offers:
- Top-tier performance with fast transactions and latency as low as 150µs
- Accelerated data with storage snapshots, or on-demand, space-efficient clones
- Flexible cloud deployment, where the environment can be on-premises or cloud only with the same data services and APIs
- Consolidation of massive database workloads on fewer arrays without compromising performance
- No service disruption for database storage with 99.9999% availability
- Forward-thinking data protection that safeguards against data loss, breaches, ransomware, or availability interruption
Data reduction plays a key role in handling exponential data growth, according to Pierce. Pure Storage delivers in-line and deep background deduplication and compression.
“[Data reduction] is important because storage costs money. If we can help reduce and mitigate that exponential data growth that is coming along in our companies, then we’re really being good stewards of the money of the companies that we work for and making better use of our infrastructures,” explained Pierce.
Pure Storage’s FlashArray solution is another crucial tool for handling the current 2024 data trends, offering:
- Easy migrations from the VM to Pure
- Easily move workloads from one array to another with full automation
- Snapshots that work 100% of the time without quiescing
- Seed replicas from storage snapshots in seconds
- Replicate data at GB/sec and not MB/sec (sync and async)
- Useable in the cloud
- No downtime while you upgrade array hardware or firmware
For an in-depth discussion about how Pure Storage can help your organization navigate 2024 data trends, you can watch an archived version of the webinar here.