Shift to object storage solutions for efficient business management

As businesses set their sights on expansion and scaling up, finding the right solutions for storing data and recovering it as and when required becomes crucial. This is primarily for two reasons: to save time and energy in data search and retrieval and to save costs by avoiding duplication. The aim, thus, for many companies, is to identify a solution to help them store data for a long term at the lowest possible cost.

While public cloud storage seems attractive at first glance, one must take care to check if the service complies with laws and policies, allows easy access to data, and fits within their budget. Here’s where an S3 storage strategy would work best.

S3 storage, which is an object-based storage, is a strategy that manages and manipulates data storage by taking each piece of data separately, designating it as an object, and bundling the file with comprehensive metadata before putting it into buckets. This agile strategy allows for infinite data storage, greater capability to scale, better optimisation of resources, and most importantly, reduced costs.

Metrics to evaluate S3 storage

Here are a few factors to keep in mind to evaluate if an object storage solution is the right choice for your business:

1. Performance of the storage system: What is the quality of performance? How compatible is it with various workloads?
2. Physical location and compliance: Where is it located and what are the data laws/risks in that region? Does it comply with local and federal laws?
3. Accessibility of data: Is data instantly accessible from any location and device? Does it need changes in application?
4. Security and durability: How capable is the storage solution to protect itself from potential threats and breaches? How reliable is it to provide a good user experience?
5. Costs of operation: What is the TCO?
6. Recovery process: How easy or difficult is the data recovery process, especially after a disaster?

Object storage helps deliver rich media by leveraging top-notch industry solutions to manage unstructured data, optimises the value of data through its lifecycle, and can effectively assist your business to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT).

Dell Solutions for efficient storage

Dell Technologies’ object storage solution Dell ObjectScale offers these benefits and more.

Dell ObjectScale is a solution that offers on-premises and colocation storage for unstructured data at public cloud scale with the reliability and control of a private cloud. It uses a tiered system for performance and archival needs, which means that after a certain period that you need the data for day-to-day activities, you can move the data into your archive without manual intervention.

Dell ObjectScale delivers rich S3 compatibility and multiprotocol interoperability on a globally distributed architecture, empowering organisations to support enterprise workloads such as cloud-native, archive, IoT, AI, and big data analytics applications at scale. A purpose-built storage solution, it boasts unmatched scalability, performance, resilience, and economics, coupled with enterprise-grade data protection and compliance capabilities.

Three factors that make Dell ObjectScale an unmatched storage solution for modern applications are:

1. Multiprotocol storage system: Also called a unified storage platform supporting S3, NFS, SMB, etc, it allows the management of files from a single device, reducing complexity and costs.
2. Multi-cloud compatibility: Thanks to Dell’s cloud adjacency offering, Dell ObjectScale is compatible with multiple public cloud storage services, allowing quicker data retrieval.
3. Better TCO for long term storage: Compared to its competitors, Dell ObjectScale offers a cost-effective pricing model, with flexible configuration to match the performance and price needs of your organisation, offered as both one-time purchase (Capex) and as “pay-per-use” flexible consumption models.

Dell ObjectScale's solutions offer unparalleled performance, compatibility and functionality to organisations of all sizes based on their data storage needs.

For their success in executing their vision and being well-positioned for tomorrow. Dell Technologies ObjectScale also features as one of few market leaders on the top right corner of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Gartner uses a graphical treatment and a uniform criteria to help users identify how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and performing against Gartner’s market view.

How does this benefit you?

1. Unlimited scalability

Dell ObjectScale scales up to accommodate multiple petabytes and exabytes of storage. This means you can keep adding data and access it all without a hassle due to limitless storage capacity. This also enables high-speed data retrieval because of object storage’s categorisation structure.

2. Helps in multi-cloud expansion

Dell ObjectScale offers cloud adjacency, which means that even as this object storage solution exists outside public cloud storage systems such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or AWS, it allows for the smooth running of applications due to storage connectivity across these systems.

Due to a multi-cloud approach, Dell ObjectScale's cloud adjacent support for public cloud further minimises data retrieval costs and additional cloud fees, thus eliminating unnecessary complexity.

3. Data IQ and strong data consistency

Dell ObjectScale includes a fully-featured data management suite so you can manage unstructured data and ensure that you can retrieve the most recent data copy even across geographies.

4. Performance benefits

Dell ObjectScale works with multiple public cloud services, supports modern workloads, and delivers higher performance with an S3-compatible storage solution. It works on a fully-managed private infrastructure which ensures that you have complete access to performance metrics.

5. Data protection

With comprehensive data backup capabilities, efficient data management, and software-defined solutions, Dell ObjectScale comes fully equipped with tools to ensure simple and flexible data protection and recovery across cloud.

6. Cost optimisation and cost-effective model at scale

An ESG audit confirmed that on-premises object storage in a customer-owned or hosted colocation facility is a more cost-effective solution for existing and emerging workloads at scale. With up to 48% less TCO than a public cloud, you will find that it is less expensive to store all your data using this solution. Besides this, Dell ObjectScale also ensures that all costs are known and controlled even if workloads change.

Several large IT service organisations rely on Dell ObjectScale for their storage services. They have managed to increase savings on migration prep, reduce costs and efforts, and have lesser configuration incidents.

*Sugumar Umapathy, Enterprise Architect & Field CTO – India Presales, Dell Technologies is a key contributor to this article.

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