When posting a photo on Facebook or Instagram, where is the photo saved? Have you thought about where all of that unstructured data lives?  Today, most of this data is stored on Object Storage platforms, which is an architecture that manages data as objects, instead of individual files. Object Storage stores unstructured data (PDFs, word, images, music, etc) using uniquely referenceable metadata (data within data), which provides date, time, and globally universal identifiers which make the data easy to find. 

On the other end of the spectrum, we find more traditional storage architecture, generally associated with file storage. This storage service is generally referred to as File or Block Storage, and is commonly  used to store more traditional data sites such as Office files, system files, or the data you would find stored on corporate SAN’s (large scale storage devices), or disc and flash drives.

To support the growing amounts of data which each of our clients are generating today, ScaleMatrix has developed a portfolio of storage services called ScaleStor. These products provide competitively priced, scalable File/Block, and Object storage capabilities to support both structured and unstructured data storage.  File/Block (SAN) and Object platforms are built to service provider standards and offer a variety of geographic redundancy, data durability, and pricing options to suit any business requirement. Data resides in secure, highly audited, cloud-enabled data centers throughout the U.S. Unlike many cloud storage services, ScaleStor clients benefit from having physical access to these sites for large scale data ingest or export, or to support facility visits with clients, vendors, or regulatory bodies. 

With the ScaleStor Object Storage platform, clients can choose the number of copies of data (to improve the security and durability of the data) as well as the geographic regions in which the data resides.  This platform is 100% S3 compatible, meaning that anyone using the software or programs which are compatible with the S3 interface, can use the ScaleStor Object Storage platform.  One of the key benefits of using ScaleStor as opposed to one of the larger hyper-scale providers like AWS, is that ScaleMatrix clients are NOT charged any in/out transfer fees when uploading or accessing key data storage on the object platform. This can amount to considerable savings for many clients using object storage today. 

ScaleMatrix also offers clients access to File/Block storage, which we call Performance Storage (SAN). Performance Storage stores structured data (large storage infrastructure, network file system) on software-defined, scalable, policy-based storage platforms. This services is used to support high performance transactional data, traditional file and operational data, as well as near-line data archiving.  Colocation, Cloud, and Managed Services clients alike enjoy the flexibility provided by these large scale SAN platforms, as they can choose to purchase only the amount of data they need at each of the product’s performance tiers, and increasing the storage capacity only requires a simple phone call. This way, clients can match their data performance requirements and quantities to their actual needs, reducing costs, and off-loading the headache of managing large-scale storage infrastructure themselves. Whether you are dealing with structured or unstructured data needs, or if you simply want to learn about the ScaleMatrix ScaleStor offer - Click here to request more information about ScaleStor. 

About smsuperadmin

The ScaleMatrix Marketing Team works with the engineering team to brainstorm and write blog posts together that IT professionals will find helpful and inspiring.  Follow @scalematrix on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Thanks for reading our blog post.