Grid Storage Architectures Provide One Way To Answer the Technology Depreciation Conundrum

For the vast majority of the IT Directors and CIOs one of the more elusive questions that that they need to answer is, “Will the  useful life of the infrastructure I just acquired match up to my depreciation cycle?” This is a slippery financial slope that anyone in IT management has to constantly be concerned about. If the useful life estimate is three years of depreciation and the equipment lasts only two, then you and your company are stuck with an extra year of depreciation on the books, as well as an extra year of maintenance you didn’t really need. Conversely, if it lasts four years, you end up depreciating too much up front and not extending the depreciation out over the appropriate period of time.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a storage system that not only can maintain a rolling depreciation cycle but also ensures that the storage administrator would never need to migrate data from its current residence to another platform? Enter the Permabit Enterprise Archive that offers this functionality at no extra charge to the customer.
The Enterprise Archive avoids the standard “forklift upgrade and data migration” processes that accompany every other storage system upgrade.  Whether your company is a homogenous or heterogeneous storage shop, you can pretty much count on the fact that your preferred manufacturer will deliver a new platform every 2-4 years. As the time for the upgrade approaches, you start a huge migration project to ensure that you can take advantage of the new features in your new storage gear. Further, planning for this event is no trivial task. You need to account for new features in the new product as well as to ensure that all of your applications remain functional pre-, during, and post migration.
Once implemented, Permabit avoids this scenario through a number of  simple mechanisms that are included as a part of Enterprise Archive’s grid based architecture. If you want to add storage capacity you simply plug in a new storage node; or, if you wish to increase ingestion performance, you alternatively plug in a new access node. When adding new storage node(s) into the grid, all the data inside the system is automatically load balanced across the new and existing nodes within the system which guarantees that you never have to manually migrate a single block of data. Now that is a process any sys admin can get used to!
Hold on, though. This same technique is used when Permabit releases larger capacity storage nodes. As Permabit delivers these releases, customers can then mix smaller capacity nodes with larger capacity nodes in the same system. The real benefit is that there is no need for you to purchase a new system to take advantage of larger capacity drives as they become available. You simply pop in the new storage nodes and keep on moving.
This also demonstrates a process for controlling the depreciation cycle of your Permabit storage by adding newer storage or access nodes over time while simplifying the process of removing the old ones as they reach the end of their useful life. In essence, Permabit creates a living and continuous storage platform that can change with your organization as time passes and technology evolves.
Today companies are looking to get the most possible value from their systems with the least possible risk to their bottom line. The value that Permabit provides with its advanced features is that they are inherent to the design of the Enterprise Archive, which negates the need for companies to purchase them separately. These forward-thinking features will enable your company to employ a rolling depreciation cycle based on the useful life of a given node, and not the total retirement of a large archival system, because most companies archive data longer than a given 3-5 year cycle. Permabit ensures that you can address longer retention periods with no costly forklift-upgrades and no expensive and painful data migrations by placing the importance on the life of your data and mitigating the typical constraints of a specific storage platform.