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The Key to Your Data’s Golden Copy – Hello ActiveScale™ 5.5

July 30, 2019 By BlueAlly


Today, we announced the new ActiveScale 5.5 OS. Packed with more capacity, new features, and better performance, here’s why ActiveScale is key to the Golden Copy of your data strategy.

Object storage has come a long way since its introduction about 10 years ago. Object storage remains a great place to put unstructured data for applications like data lakes, data hubs, repositories that can support analytics, high performance computing and data sharing. As the technology improves and experience with this class of storage expands, new capabilities emerge. The power of these new capabilities comes at the intersection of your data strategy and technology.

From Analytics to an Overarching Data Strategy – the Role of the Golden Copy

With data and analytics becoming key drivers of business differentiation and competitive advantage, creating a data strategy becomes increasingly critical to business success.

Two critical elements of a data strategy are 1) understanding all of the data you already have, and what data you may need to obtain and 2) create an environment that treats data like an asset so you can cultivate it and harvest its value.

A Golden Copy, or single source of truth as it is sometimes known, is a critical component of data architecture, as it’s the reference that can allow you to use data for multiple purposes to leverage its value. It is also where all stakeholders can turn to and ensure that they have the correct version of data. The Golden Copy of your data will become a curated repository of data that can be used for multiple purposes by multiple departments. As such, it needs to be able to support a large repository, be accessible, mineable, extractable and extremely reliable – see this great example of our Big Data Platform:

ActiveScale OS 5.5 – Powerful Features and Better Economics for Your Central Store

The ActiveScale cloud object storage system has been updated with OS 5.5 that provides additional features that further enhance its use as a central store of value for your data – the safe for your golden copy. There are a few exciting features in this announcement can help you implement your data strategy.

More Capacity and Better Economics

First, it’s about scale. With new, 14TB HDDs ActiveScale can now scale out to 74PB raw capacity in a single namespace. That’s plenty of room to create a massive data lake, data hub, or Golden Copy repository.

Performance at Scale

Secondly, it’s about performance at scale. New testing shows that ActiveScale can scale performance as well as capacity, projected up to 75GB/sec bandwidth for moving a lot of data in a hurry. We did some tuning to improve the way files perform in ActiveScale as well. With ActiveScale 5.5 you can also get performance in a geo-spread environment with asynchronous geo-spread that allows an eventual consistency to combine availability and performance to overcome distance latency. To dig a little deeper on unstructured data performance check a blog on the topic here.

Put Your Data to Work

Thirdly, it’s about features that put your data to work. ActiveScale 5.5 has a new feature, Data Pipeline Service, that integrates storage into your workflow. ActiveScale will notify a message service, like Apache Kafka®, about an object event such as creation of a new object. This allows Kafka to kickoff an application that can then take action on the new object.

For example, an incoming S3 object can be transformed into a format that will work in a customer’s data lake for a Golden Copy use case. The only limit to the potential applications for this technology is your imagination. This is a great workflow improvement capability you should consider.

Maximize the Value of Your Data

Creating a data strategy is the first step to your journey of maximizing the value of your data. ActiveScale 5.5 is a great framework to enable you to start treating data as an asset and can be the foundation of your Golden Copy data strategy.

Find out more about the new ActiveScale 5.5 and our recent announcement of IntelliFlash™ 3.10, our primary all-flash and hybrid storage offering, in this webcast.