The Data Conundrum

Today’s Retailers are awash in high-volume, high-velocity data coming at them from all sides…

eCommerce, for example, has become a driving force of global economics. Business-to-customer sales facilitated by the Internet surpassed $1 Trillion several years ago, according to IBM research, and will soon account for over 5 percent of all worldwide economic activity. eCommerce is a performance-driven platform that requires high scalability, stability and quick response times as the volume of transactions continues to rise.

In addition to creating entirely new business models, e-commerce converged with digital/mobile/social has brought retail into a whole new vista many call omni-channel. Omni-channel sales are expected to account for 59% of all retail sales by the year 2018.

With omni-channel comes a requirement for access and visibility to inventory at its most granular level and across all channels, along with fulfillment and tracking capability. New technologies are called for, such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), but come at the cost of even higher volumes of data.

The physical store is also investing in technology that allows them to better interact with and understand their customers. Retailers are adopting technology that will interact with their customers’ internet enabled devices such as smartphones, watches, and/or appliances in the hopes of offering new services, all of which will require whole new data structures that support real-time responses.

All of this is bringing an explosive growth of data that is expected to reach almost 40 zettabytes, or 300 times its 2005 levels by 2020, giving retailers pause to consider the consequences these activities will have on current infrastructures and storage strategies.

Data has become the new currency for retailers, their most critical asset. But, retailers are spending too much money and time focused on where their data is stored and not enough on its performance and use.

• They purchase 24% more storage every year, yet use less than half of the capacity they already have.
• They spend 70% of IT budgets on operations and maintenance instead of innovation and insights.
• And they don’t spend enough on projects that would provide value from their data.
• 72% of companies have not started or are only just planning Big Data activities

The current approach has been more reactive than proactive, leading to retailers blindly adding capacity and ending up with data trapped in storage silos, duplicate data, extended refresh cycles, and ad hoc cloud usage that leads to dead-ends and the need to buy more storage.

In order to get a handle on this data conundrum, retail decision makers must understand their objectives, constraints, and options. No more one-off decisions that may disrupt business, impact current systems, put a drag on performance, and curb innovation.

Key objectives would include:

• Efficiency – The need to simplify management and optimize utilization
• Performance – Accelerate compression for performance improvement
• Resiliency –Near-continuous data availability
• Scalability – Ability to increase capacity and performance as needed

With the barrage of data that is already bearing down, it is time for retail to start thinking strategy. Why a strategy? To begin with, most enterprises have data center floor space constraints and limited data storage capacity for supporting test environments or backing up and replicating data. Many enterprises also have limited primary storage capacity. At the same time, there are issues around power requirements, performance, on-going management, and of course expense.

There is also much to consider in the way of options as well as cloud computing services that are emerging as major forces in providing secure, elastic, and agile enterprise-class storage capacity.

Do you do it yourself and at what cost with what benefits? Or do you look to outside services?

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t always have to rip the engine out of a car to make it better. You can trick-it-out. Imagine assimilating all of your existing storage into a new system that makes the investments you have already made faster and stronger. The answer to gaining an interoperable, faster, more efficient storage solution may not be a net-new infrastructure purchase. The hardware you invested in a few years back may still be good, but can be made better. If you re-awaken your team’s competitive aptitude you may be able to protect your storage investment, trim your operational costs, and discover how seamless, convenient software features can revitalize the decisions and investments you’ve already made in your storage infrastructure.

Throughout the remainder of this series, we will be looking more closely at the following options that may help you trick-out your own investment and deliver a storage strategy that will take you well into the future:

• Virtualization – the ability to aggregate previously siloed and disconnected storage devices into a large virtual pool of storage that is managed from a single interface and that offers advanced functionality and performance not previously available.
• Compression and De-duplication – the ability to compress data by removing unnecessary identical bits but still maintaining the integrity of the data to keep it viable.
• Flash – the technology used in high performance storage devices that replaces conventional spinning disk with solid state memory.  It holds tremendous advantages in terms of speed, reliability, power consumption, heat production.