DBTA E-EDITION
September 2017 - UPDATE
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Trends and Applications
It's still months away, but it is never too early to start thinking about the holiday shopping season, especially since most Americans are already anticipating outages and system failures from their favorite online retailers. According to a survey, 52% of shoppers expect to experience an outage on days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. When web and mobile sites buckle under huge volumes of traffic and experience outages, retailers lose revenue, and their brands suffer significantly. To prepare for the busiest online shopping season, companies need to ensure their systems are ready for extreme scalability and continuous IT operations, year-round.
Linear scaling with legacy storage appliances is no longer an option. The burden that traditional architecture feels from today's tsunami of data is surpassed only by the cost required to meet current and future demands. Aside from the huge expense, this method of increasing storage capacity would take too long. Even adding multiple servers could not accommodate storage demands. Vertical storage architecture contains bottlenecks that slow performance to an unacceptable level. Software-defined storage (SDS) scales horizontally instead, making it a popular option.
Regardless of industry, the ability to collect, manage, and intelligently leverage data will clearly be a differentiator for the foreseeable future. Executives in healthcare are acutely aware of the disruption being driven by this new paradigm and understand that this trend is impacting every sector, from banking to farming to manufacturing. Ultimately, investing time and resources in data collection and analysis is only valuable if it provides insight for making proactive, tactical decisions. Innovative companies today are using big data and analytics to drive attributable revenue and compete more effectively.