Page 5 - GCN, Jan/Feb 2016

DATA STORAGE TECHNOLOGY SPONSORED REPORT GAME CHANGING TECHNOLOGY TO MEET AGENCY MISSIONS
Massive Data Stores Require More Storage than Ever Before
State and local government agencies are experiencing many of the
same storage challenges faced by large businesses. And often their challenges are more intense and there’s more at stake. Take e-mail, for example. Even with the standard policy of deleting employee e-mail after 90 days, states can easily be required to store billions of e-mails at any given time. That’s a lot of storage.
The use of video also is escalating by leaps and bounds throughout state and local government agencies due to the growth of video surveillance and the use of video in courts and prisons. According to the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), video is the largest source of new data that states must keep.
in government offices eventually will
be tracked, analyzed and connected
to agency networks. The report also determined IoT data will grow 40 percent year over year for the next five years.
And as state and local governments begin to store social media data as well, the amount of required storage will continue to grow exponentially. And that’s just one example. As more agencies let their employees use mobile devices for work, the amount of data that must be securely stored is skyrocketing.
Then there is the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT connects devices like sensors, wearable devices and other machines to the Internet. State and local government agencies are using this technology to gather data with the goal of improving government services. Some examples include collecting traffic data from transportation networks and roads, building data to improve the efficiency of government buildings and monitoring public utilities to reduce outages and speed restoration.
Traditional storage infrastructures
still in place at many agencies— network-attached storage and storage area networks—still have value in a tiered storage architecture, but those technologies alone are insufficient to manage the sheer amount of storage or the performance needed to access data quickly and accommodate data analytics. Thankfully, however, there are cost- effective, performance-rich alternatives that will help agencies fully embrace the data-intensive future.
Consider, for example, an app that lets law enforcement access geocoded crime data and other spatially referenced data to locate crimes. Or case workers in the field who need to access data while in the field to improve health or child safety. All that data must be stored securely.
According to a report by IDC Government Insights, most mechanical, electrical, IT or security-related devices
Flash Storage is Growing Fast—
and for Good Reason
As state and local government agencies need to store more and more data, existing storage infrastructures often can’t keep up. They aren’t scalable or fast enough. They’re also often too expensive and difficult to manage.
than traditional spinning disk storage methods. Flash storage systems also
are exceptionally fast—with seek times measured in the nanoseconds—and have less latency than other storage mediums.
to meet the increasingly demanding performance requirements of today’s government data centers. There are many ways government agencies can use flash storage in the data center, from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and storage for virtual servers to database access.
That’s where flash storage comes in. When flash is deployed as part of a modern storage infrastructure, it can address
the major pain points of performance, manageability and cost. At its most basic, flash is solid state storage that stores data on a memory chip and uses a controller to manage access to the storage on the chip.
Unlike hybrid disk arrays, for example, which deliver a latency measured in the tens of milliseconds, all-flash storage
has less than 1 ms of latency. Similarly, traditional hard disk drives typically
Cost is another factor. Not only will agencies buy far fewer solid state drives than hard disk drives, they will also save more in power and cooling and simplified management. While evaluating flash storage from Pure Storage, for example, Forrester Research found risk-adjusted benefits of more than $1.9 million over three years, with an ROI of 102 percent.
With no moving mechanical parts, flash storage requires much less power
With this type of performance, flash-based storage is well-positioned
run at about 200 IOPS (input/output operations per second), compared to solid state drives like flash, which tend to run at less than 20,000 IOPS.
GameChanger