Opinion
Exploiting the power of data
Energy businesses are reliant on very large datasets and powerful database applications to perform many of their core business operations. Tim Butchart reports.
Tim Butchart informa que los negocios de energía son dependientes de conjuntos de datos muy grandes y aplicaciones de poderosas base de datos para realizar muchas operaciones de negocio principal.
Energieunternehmen benötigen sehr große Datensätze und leistungsstarke Datenbankanwendungen zur Durchführung ihrer wesentlichen Geschäftstätigkeit. Tim Butchart berichtet.
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il and gas companies are among the world’s largest producers of data, derived from diverse activities in exploration,
seismic analyses, refining and other highly-specialised activities, as well as distribution, marketing – plus the operational activities of any major enterprise. So it’s hardly surprising that energy businesses have been among the first to shoulder the enormous burden of maintaining pace with the data explosion. With data volumes growing exponentially, and backup windows narrowing, data protection and backup become more challenging. Data experts at analyst firm IDC say that between 2005 and 2020, we will have witnessed a growth in worldwide digital data from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes, with the total volume of global data doubling every year from now until 2020. As a result, these analysts believe that large industrial enterprises will have to invest 40% more in IT equipment each year during the same period to cope with the growth. With these levels of investment to consider, it’s vital to get purchasing decisions right. Energy businesses are reliant on very large datasets and powerful database applications to perform many of their core business operations – everything from integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suites to email systems. To keep mission-critical and production data protected, it’s important to identify the most critical qualities essential in a future- proofed data protection system. It should certainly be capable of delivering a robust backup and recovery strategy, a solid plan for dealing with persistent data growth; greater controls over ever richer datasets; interoperability with existing investments; and the ability to meet shrinking backup windows while making life less stressful for managers and administrators.
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www.engineerlive.com
With ever richer datasets expanding exponentially, IT and data managers need to find innovative ways to add capacity and performance in order to reliably backup and protect critical information. But they must achieve all this while avoiding shackling datacentres further by adding successive devices into already- crowded racks and simply exacerbating the problem with data sprawl.
Data sprawl Datacentre sprawl is a phenomenon characterised by a poorly planned infrastructure of physical storage equipment that lacks long-term efficiency or data protection strategy. Generally a sprawling storage environment builds up around server racks with low usage levels that are wasting space, time and energy allocations. Sprawl is crippling for any businesses, but has its greatest impact on enterprises with the largest data demands – such as oil and gas companies. It prevents the effective protection, management and storage of data, while inhibiting business growth and in some cases leaving critical IT systems vulnerable to total failure or outage. Without intelligent planning, an energy business can find its IT infrastructures reduced to intimidating, wire-crossed jungles of physical storage equipment. Often these have simply been allowed to expand organically as additional repositories are added in panic responses to rising data demands. Under the pressures of unprecedented
data growth, it is somewhat understandable that large volume servers have been added to some business datacentres in the past, as quick fixes without any thought to a long-term solution. Unfortunately in many cases, these initial fire-fighting methods are now preventing businesses from pausing and restructuring.
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