Infographic: Transform your data management

Everybody knows that data is continuing to grow at an alarming rate across all industries. Traditionally the way this problem has been handled was to throw more hardware at it. This model isn’t very cost effective and can also introduce added complexity and require new skillsets if unfamiliar hardware is adopted. In addition most organizations are looking at ways to help reduce cost and that includes keeping the cost of staff to the essentials, meaning even if your storage is experiencing large amounts of growth it is unlikely to be met with an increase in IT professionals to support it. This forces a lot of organizations to look for innovative ways to help manage their data growth, that doesn’t include expensive hardware solutions. This is where Windows 2012 has some key features that can help manage data growth more efficiently, by either removing shared storage in some cases or helping to further optimize existing shared storage to gain additional efficiency. Sharing Nothing Live Migration allows you flexibility to choose if you need shared storage or not for live migration of your virtual machines, eliminating additional complexity. Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) allows data transfer to take place between storage hardware without requiring transfer through the server, this decreases the time taken for data transfers and reduces the workload on the servers providing much more efficiency. File system de-duplication allows Hyper-V virtual machines to consume less space as it allows virtual machines that use the same operating system files to be de-duplicated to further increase consolidation rates and help lower overall storage costs.

Windows 2012 really presents a very innovative way to help manage storage growth for environments that have either shared storage, no shared storage or even both. A key benefit that comes with the Windows Server platform is that a lot of IT professionals already have knowledge and experience on Windows Server. There are also a lot of publicly available resources such as best practice guides, whitepapers and data sheets to help support IT professionals getting up to speed. This means existing staff doesn’t need a substantial time investment in getting up to speed with the new features and can quickly provide additional efficiency to companies.