The Storage Revolution… another?

So as I was sitting in our partner port at SAP in Waldorf the other day talking with other SUSE folk about our new, exciting partnership that we have with HPE around Storage, my mind started whirring back to my days at Veritas.

I remember going to a storage event in London, and being fascinated as I stared through the glass window of the massive, circular tape libraries in which a central robot arm spun around, taking tapes from one slot, delivering them to another. These giants were the solution to the growing need to back up and store massive amounts of data. Back then, this was largely due to the impact of new compliance regulations and the requirement for companies to store emails and electronic documents for a given length of time. These were the answer to when we would be talking in terabytes – yes, whole terabytes of storage!!

Well terabytes kind of came and went, (I believe you can actually buy a terabyte on a USB stick now), so did the big tape libraries, but data still explodes. In addition to compliance, the massive growth of data these days is largely due to all those pesky youths taking selfies and chatting to each other over whatever social media channel is deemed cool. Companies have realized that there’s gold in data and are beginning to store and mine more and more of it.

Unfortunately there’s a crippling cost associated to that massive growth and many IT directors are now staring in disbelief at their big EMC boxes, realizing that they’ve got to embark on the lengthy process involved in getting the approval for another one already as they’re quickly reaching capacity. Such a big spend in one go, and how long will this one last?

So this brings me back to our exciting partnership with HPE. SUSE and HPE have teamed up to provide a Scalable Object Storage Solution that combines SUSE Enterprise Storage 3, our intelligent software-defined storage management solution, fully supported and validated with three HPE hardware platforms.

This means that now, instead of buying a single, big expensive box to store your massive amounts of data, you can simply add to it as you go – a bit like Lego (OK, maybe I’m over-simplifying it a little bit). But anyway, the big benefit is that you can spread your costs out as your data grows. You can choose HPE Apollo 4000 high-density server that’s built for big data analytics, object storage, and high-performance computing, HPE Cloudline CL5200 designed for massively scaled datacenters, or familiar hardware that you’ve probably already got on your list like HPE ProLiant DL380.

Definitely worthy of being called the next Storage Revolution!