Everything Is Not The Same Application Data Value Characteristics

This is part one of a five-part mini-series looking at Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same as a companion excerpt from chapter 2 of my new book Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft (CRC Press 2017).available at Amazon.com and other global venues. In this post, we start things off by looking at general application server storage I/O characteristics that have an impact on data value as well as access.

Everything is not the same across different organizations including Information Technology (IT) data centers, data infrastructures along with the applications as well as data they support. For example, there is so-called big data that can be many small files, objects, blobs or data and bit streams representing telemetry, click stream analytics, logs among other information.

Keep in mind that applications impact how data is accessed, used, processed, moved and stored. What this means is that a focus on data value, access patterns, along with other related topics need to also consider application performance, availability, capacity, economic (PACE) attributes.

If everything is not the same, why is so much data along with many applications treated the same from a PACE perspective?

Data Infrastructure resources including servers, storage, networks might be cheap or inexpensive, however, there is a cost to managing them along with data.

Managing includes data protection (backup, restore, BC, DR, HA, security) along with other activities. Likewise, there is a cost to the software along with cloud services among others. By understanding how applications use and interact with data, smarter, more informed data management decisions can be made.

Keep in mind that with Application Data Value Characteristics Everything Is Not The Same across various organizations, data centers, data infrastructures spanning legacy, cloud and other software-defined data center (SDDC) environments. However, all applications have some element (high or low) of performance, availability, capacity, economic (PACE) along with various similarities. Likewise, data has different value at various times. Read more here.