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Use the ocean of data to your advantage

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Tony Huynh
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Take a minute and think back to a joyous time in your life when you were near the ocean. Were you with your parents? A small group of close friends during the summer? With your children on their first trip to the beach?

The light smell of salt in the air, the wondrous sand underneath your feet, and of course the waves breaking. The ocean is mesmerizingly beautiful. However, we also know we should never underestimate its power because of its sheer volume and energy.

Is it too far a stretch to compare the ocean to the power and volume of your organization’s unstructured data? Just like the ocean, that data is immense, constantly in motion, and changing. So you need a careful and thoughtful approach to make the most of it.

Managing your unstructured data

Unstructured data is usually managed outside a transactional system. An example is data that doesn’t live in a relational database management system (RDBMS). Structured data typically consists of records (or transactions) in a database environment—for example, rows in a table of a SQL database.

There are great uses for both structured and unstructured data, and both have a broad set of tools to allow users to access the data.

Unstructured data just happens to be generated in significantly greater volume than structured data.

Here are some examples of unstructured data that you might have in your IT environment:

Almost 30 years ago, NetApp recognized that customers needed a simple, reliable, and scalable way to manage their unstructured data. So, we introduced the industry’s first NAS platform with NetApp® Snapshot technology.

This customer-focused, ingrained-in-our-DNA approach has yielded innovations that have direct and tangible benefits today to help you succeed with your modern, multicloud strategy for managing unstructured data. Our goal is to continue to provide you with cloud-connected solutions that let you effectively manage and take advantage of your unstructured data.

Leadership in the GigaOm rankings

Most recently, GigaOm’s Radar assessment of enterprise scale-out NAS solutions ranked NetApp ONTAP® data management software as scale-out NAS solution #1, ahead of 14 other competitors, large and small.

With native unstructured data support for all three hyperscalers—Amazon FSx, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud—you can seamlessly manage data across your on-premises on multicloud deployments. GigaOm said that NetApp is the “clear winner,” due to its “unmatched cloud integration” and “rich set of data services.”

So, let us help you embrace and benefit from your ocean of unstructured data. Wear your flip-flops.

Read the GigaOm Radar report on enterprise scale-out NAS solutions.

See how DreamWorks creates movie magic with ONTAP scale-out NAS solutions.  

But wait—there’s more! Our engineering leader Octavian Tanase shares his thoughts on how NetApp is the only vendor to lead in all three GigaOm Radar reports, which evaluate storage solutions across the hybrid cloud.

Tony Huynh

Tony Huynh has over ten years of solutions and product marketing experience in data center management, analytics, automation SaaS, and core cloud infrastructure areas.

View all Posts by Tony Huynh

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