Written by Alfons Michels
What Is Secondary Storage?
Secondary storage complements the storage used for your major day-to-day operations (typically called primary storage).
Primary storage is fast and highly available, but it also has its
(high) price. However, there are likely large volumes of data that do
not need the level of performance that your business-critical production
applications need, and that is where secondary storage enters the picture.
It is still very important that all of this data is still accessible
when needed, but often cost-effective devices-either a little bit older
or with limited storage services-are used. Usually secondary storage is
based on "mass storage devices" for these use cases:
- Cold data
- Data with long retention requirements that is still needed online
- Online archiving/backups
- File storage; offsite storage (e.g. for disaster recovery, which can also be in the cloud)
- Private cloud storage (with low-cost, onsite capacity).
Two Key Problems to Solve
As explained above, the two most common challenges users face with
secondary storage are cost and management. Leveraging existing storage
investments or using comparably cheap storage hardware has resulted in a
variety of different technologies used as secondary storage.
On one hand, that has created a fragmented storage infrastructure,
often paired with different storage service levels, making overall
management difficult. On the other hand, to harmonize such a diverse
storage landscape with so much data would result in tremendous new
investments if you merged it into one hardware platform.
So how can IT overcome these barriers?
Leveraging Software-Defined Storage for Secondary Storage
To address these problems, modern IT departments are leveraging software-defined storage
(SDS) technology. Just like virtualization helped solve similar
problems in the compute layer, SDS is solving challenges in the storage
space.
Software-defined storage helps you to lower the costs of high storage
volumes required for secondary storage while providing central and
uniform management of the entire storage architecture, regardless of
what storage devices you use. Additional capabilities-including high
availability, auto-tiering, and thin provisioning-help you to reduce management tasks further while ensuring data is always available.
Among the benefits of software-defined storage technology are the
ability to future-proof your storage environment, integrate new
technologies, simplify expandability, and execute smooth, non-disruptive
data migrations.
By using SDS, you are able to leverage high-end storage features for
any disk with a clear separation between high-performance primary
storage and cost-effective secondary storage-offering cloud-like
economics.
Success Story: Jena Optronik
Jena Optronik,
a pioneer of multispectral space research and among market leaders
worldwide in the field of position control sensors, uses an SDS-powered
secondary storage solution to complement a high-availability
infrastructure.
The solution Jena Optronik implemented is optimized for the
cost-effective storage of large amounts of data. As a result, Jena
Optronik fulfills its business requirement for high availability of the
production and development data for its innovative space research
sensors and ensures fast access to project data with a retention period
of more than 20 years.
According to Reiner Pohl, Head of IT at Jena Optronik:
"The hardware independence of the DataCore solution is
the key to a future-oriented, flexible infrastructure and the extension
costs are calculable. We can integrate new storage technologies and be
prepared for the next 20 years."