Historically, information technology professionals made storage investment decisions based on only a few metrics – typically how fast data can be written to a storage media and how fast it can be read back when needed. Reliability and cost efficiency were also included. This interesting information came to us from Network World in their article, “Why speeds and feeds don’t fix your data management problems.

Latency – the time interval between the cause and the effect – will remain a consideration for any data storage decision. However, with the cloud and object storage gaining popularity, additional costs must be considered. For instance, the opportunity cost of having to power and manage the resource if they choose to archive data off premise.

Up until recently there was no relationship or communication between applications and storage. They have been oblivious to each other’s needs and benefits. With real-time metadata intelligence, information professionals can understand how applications experience storage and make decisions based upon what they learn.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.