Where to Store Your Business Data

Data Storage Providers
Everyone’s data needs are getting larger and larger, with data being stored by companies and individuals remotely. The benefits include professional data storage ensuring that a users’ or companies’ data is kept safe by data storage providers. Initially this was small amounts of data being saved however these days it is becoming ‘big data’ where ECC is a key requirement for any operation to ensure parity of the data. Transfer speeds also need to be the best through leveraging the best hardware available. Furthermore, to help with transferring and storing data, it needs to be separated into logical data pools for retrieval.  
Big data storage providers have to cope with all of the above criteria as well as having enough overhead and switch space to enable seamless data transfer. To help enable this the database configuration, table spaces and format used is critical. Queries may be handled through clustered configurations and a replica database and storage sites positioned in key geographical locations to reduce latency for data retrieval. Ad-hoc queries will need to be setup when data is not in a location near the user and data replicated in scheduled activities to ensure the lowest latency, between the users query and the big data provided. This along with periodic backups, monitoring and maintenance of raid configurations mean that a lot of work goes into providing a client the data they have stored.

 
Premium Price for Premium Storage Performance
One of the biggest challenges with big data apart from ensuring parity throughout the transfer, storage and retrieval process is the storage life. Irrespective of whether a disk, tape or flash based media is used, all drives and flash SMC’s fail. The modes of failure is different. With disk drives mechanical wear of moving components, stress on tape storage and with flash drives it is the charge of the bit that deteriorates the storage medium. It is due to these reasons that big data storage providers charge what appears to be a premium for what the customer expects; it is in part due to this, larger energy bills and carbon offsetting bonds. Big data will be cycled on more of each drive increasing the probability of failure and need for staff to check, switch out the drive and synchronized with the RAID configuration used. While this does not stop a business from operating, it does require additional overhead capacity to cope with user requirements even on the worst day of maintenance.   

Summary
No matter your work or personal life, big data is becoming the de-facto standard in data requirements with dedicated big data storage providers stepping up to the mark. As time goes on we will see more individuals using big data for personal projects and social activities, such as 3D scanning and printing digital assets, creating their own 3D games from such assets and have further accessibility to technology that enables big data creation and usage. Currently there are phones being rolled out by Apple and Google that will have artificial intelligence SMC processor to work with the main device processor and sensors such as camera. Unlike years gone by new 3D scanning software will be integrated into mobile devices with no external products required to facilitate scanning. Furthermore, thanks to 5G being 100x faster than 4G, point cloud data can be scanned and noise processed either on the phone or server side with users seeing results from the server in real-time. Due to limitations on space being driven by service cost it is likely that big data will get bigger with users and businesses paying more for the opportunity to get better results than the competition. Thus, data storage providers will likely still be an emerging market in the near future with software developers exploiting the best quality offerings available.