As enterprise data usage rises, companies are trying to find ways to efficiently handle increasingly large repositories of cold data, which is data that is written to tape or cloud storage once and accessed only infrequently. To provide more cost-efficient and scalable storage, Rorke Data, a member of the Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance, and SageCloud recently announced a partnership that will result in a high-capacity disk-based cold storage system that synthesizes open source software and standards-based hardware. Accordingly, enterprises will be able to customize it for a wide range of data center needs and streamline their costs.
Rorke and SageCloud’s solution may be particularly beneficial to industries such as healthcare and financial services that routinely generate petabytes of data. Almost 80 percent of enterprise data may be cold data, and its enormous volume can strain IT infrastructure, since many companies still rely on tape as a low cost way to offset storage expenses.
Speaking to All Things Digital, Facebook infrastructure executive Frank Frankovsky characterized cold storage as an “underserved” sector in IT that was primed for a breakthrough solution.
“The real challenge is to provide effective cold storage,” said Frankovsky. “You have to maintain good retrieval speed. You can’t lose the data.”
Many organizations still rely on tape for cold storage, but Rorke and SageCloud have created an alternative with costs, scalability and archiving abilities that make it an appealing upgrade for companies with high storage needs.
“With this relationship in place, information technology and internet service provider customers will have solutions that dramatically lower their data storage costs,” said SageCloud CEO and founder Jeff Flowers, later adding “As data storage costs and requirements outstrip IT budgets, particularly as a result of big data platform adoption, affordable cold data storage is a must-have.”
