In the age of the Internet of Things (IOT) where data is highly coveted but often mismanaged, it can be a major source of frustration for IT managers in companies ranging from SMB to large enterprises. Fortunately, Dell EMC is a corporation that has become very successful in providing solutions to customers that creates win-win situations.
Dell EMC’s Unity storage with Cloud Tiering Appliance (CTA) is one example of a solution that has helped businesses save both money through improved TCO, and space by freeing up inactive file storage so that it can run day to day operations more efficiently. CTA is an automated, policy-based data management application that tiers data to public clouds such as VirtuStream, Microsoft, and Amazon. It also has deployment flexibility in terms of Physical or Physical-HA, Virtual or Virtual-HA.
The entertainment industry is a great example of a business area that can benefit from an application like CTA. Typically, a movie studio will release numerous movies a year and depending on the type of film, they can easily amount to over 20 petabytes of data per film – especially animated films. At any one time, a major studio could be working on several different films – representing a ton of data to manage all at once! In many cases, with films like Shrek and Kung Fu Panda where there are sequels, data from the previous film has to be reused during production. Having all that data from previous films on primary storage could cause some serious delays in work performance and capacity that rapidly raises costs. Here is where an application like CTA is so beneficial. By intelligently tiering inactive data (data generated from completed films) to less expensive public cloud providers, and freeing up space on existing storage, the company can save on CAPEX for the next movie development effort.
Many other industries like finance and the healthcare industry also carry lots of inactive data and can use extra space to create new financial accounts, update patient records, and be able to generate lots of other new data over time and during various cycles. This is why companies in these industries make excellent candidates for Unity Cloud Tiering Appliance. Similar to the film industry, businesses in other industries with data growing to the petabyte level are going to need automated file tiering, seamless retrieval, freed up storage, and improved TCO of their storage system. What better way to manage an organizations data than with a system that can intelligently manage it for them?