The Characteristics of a Good Data Storage Solution

Almost all good data storage solutions have the same underlying characteristics. Ensuring availability, durability and integrity are crucial components of every system.

Data storage solutions are necessary for any business. Often, businesses may not even know what data they will need and when they will need it. There is a lot of data in the world and we all need a place to keep it. Previously, we discussed data stores and their different uses. Data storage solutions have largely moved to cloud provider solutions. Even the solutions that exist in data centers now function more like network attached storage or cloud storage. At the end of the day, though, businesses need to store data in a way that is backed up, durable and has high integrity.

Cloud services data solutions often automatically handle backing up your data. Simple storage service, or S3, from AWS or blob storage from Azure can keep expanding and adding more places to store things pretty infinitely. There are massive storage solutions in the petabyte and beyond that you can get in the cloud that function like network attached storage. You can also requisition large volumes of data in the cloud for storage. Scale in the cloud or any serious data center appliance is generally not a problem of serious significance with modern solutions.

Backing up your data and having a storage solution that automatically scales with your business is huge, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Your data has to be durable, meaning it’s always available. Businesses don’t always know what data they will need and when, so it needs to be readily available. If it gets deleted, it won’t be available, which is also where automatic backups come in handy. These two combine to keep data integrity – meaning no one has tampered with it and you have versions of data and backups of those versions. These three elements are crucial for any successful data storage solution.

On top of data storage solutions, there are many software methodologies to appropriately shard and replicate data into multiple locations in a quick and robust way.

The best data storage solutions share the durability, integrity and back ups characteristics discussed above, but they are also highly available, they have versioning, they are scalable, and they are properly configured for security by default and they are highly connected.

When we discuss scalability, often we think about how much information can be stuffed into an S3 bucket. But scalability also includes the ability to move large amounts of data or to open a large volume of connections at the same time and still respond in with data in a timely manner. We summarize this as connectivity. Essentially, 50,000 queries could be made to a data store to request data in a number of different forms and sizes and the response time it would take to return that data back to all of those queries will be largely unchanged, even at scale. So while this is technically part of scalability in general, it is worth mentioning separately because most people don’t think about scalability as including connectivity. It can be equally as important for speed in getting data that is requested as it is for your data store to handle all of the data you pile in it.

The cloud has really taken over as the number one data storage solution. All major cloud providers and minor cloud providers offer data storage solutions for their customers, and this is probably the future of data stores, because you can easily allocate massive amounts of storage. Everything is moving to the cloud because of the benefits it provides and being able to get elastic scaling in the cloud makes the decision to use it relatively simple. You can store data files that are much bigger than what you can fit into a traditional solution, and it costs far less as well. Yes, you will have the hurdle of the data transfer from a physical location to a virtual one, but you’re going to have that headache no matter when you make the change. And you will have to make that change at some point.

While the data transfer process can be time consuming, it is a necessary step in the process of creating a solid data storage solution plan. Most people now consider the cloud as the primary place for a data storage solution because it has all of the characteristics needed, plus, depending on your provider and the services you purchase, your data storage solution can automatically scale elastically aka pay for what you use. Cloud based storage solutions are typically far less expensive than on-premise data centers. If you are looking for a different data storage solution, be sure that no matter what you pick, it includes the characteristics of being scalable, durable, available, secure and maintains versions and backs up your data.

About the Author

PWV Consultants is a boutique group of industry leaders and influencers from the digital tech, security and design industries that acts as trusted technical partners for many Fortune 500 companies, high-visibility startups, universities, defense agencies, and NGOs. Founded by 20-year software engineering veterans, who have founded or co-founder several companies. PWV experts act as a trusted advisors and mentors to numerous early stage startups, and have held the titles of software and software security executive, consultant and professor. PWV's expert consulting and advisory work spans several high impact industries in finance, media, medical tech, and defense contracting. PWV's founding experts also authored the highly influential precursor HAZL (jADE) programming language.

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