Half of organizations in the U.S. and UK with over 1000 employees are managing 5PB or more of data and those managing more than 10PB of data grew from 27% to 32% this year, a 19% increase, according to the Komprise 2023 State of Unstructured Data Management. This blog discusses how a global namespace is critical to managing petabytes of data.
This rate of data growth is a concern—from ensuring data protection and compliance, to managing data storage and backup costs, and responding to business needs for simple, fast data access. In fact, 72% of organizations report that data volumes are growing faster than their ability to manage them, according to Foundry.
One Plane to Manage and Optimize All Your Data
This is where unstructured data management comes into play—and a global namespace. Imagine having one place to get visibility into data across all your silos, identify hot and cold data, and plan and execute data migrations and data tiering across all your storage and cloud locations? And what if this same system allowed your users to search for relevant data across storage silos and feed AI/ML pipelines and create automated data workflows? These are the many advantages of a global namespace for enterprise data storage.
As unstructured data volumes continue to expand exponentially, data silos proliferate and IT budgets remain relatively flat, many organizations are interested in simplifying data visibility and managing data across various silos. A global namespace can offer this.
However, it’s important to note that a global namespace does not require a global file system (GFS), despite vendors often claiming this to be the case.
- A GFS sits in front of the data and serves the appropriate files, thus acting as a controller.
- A GFS is useful in certain collaboration scenarios where simultaneous editing of large files is needed across geographically disparate locations that can share data without violating data privacy issues.
- Yet for the broader use case of visibility across data silos, a global namespace that is not in the hot data path is a better solution for unstructured data management, data tiering and feeding data to AI/ML applications with the best performance.
Our latest paper looks at the issue in detail, explaining the differences between a global namespace and a GFS. Download it here.
Top things to know about a global namespace
- A GFS delivers one siloed view of your data—but not the entire view unless you are only using one storage vendor, or you are willing to control all data access through a single vendor.
- Unstructured data management should sit outside the hot data path and bring visibility to all data, not just data that it fronts. It should right-place data while putting users in full control of their data.
- Managing data growth requires an unstructured data management solution that delivers a global namespace, not a global file system. It is important to understand your use case and pick the best solution that fits your needs.
In a world overflowing with unstructured data of many diverse types and across many different silos from on-premises to the cloud, Komprise delivers the primary benefits of a global namespace that can cut costs, support departmental data services and help extract greater value from your unstructured data.
Read the white paper to learn more!
