In part one of this three-part series I summed up how the way we produce and consume data has evolved over the last three decades, creating a need for new storage methodologies that can help enterprises store and effectively manage massive pools of data. I concluded that the immutable nature of unstructured data storage holds the key to solving the scalability and availability problems of traditional file storage.
Unstructured data has traditionally been stored in file-based systems, which enable users to access files simultaneously and modify them. This is great functionality for office environments, where multiple users might indeed be updating each other’s spreadsheets, but it is complete overkill when storing data that will probably never be changed again. DDN developed our Web Object Scaler (WOS) solution with this “unchanging” aspect of data in mind.