For the last few decades, the storage industry has focused on decreasing the cost per terabyte while increasing capacity and performance, but little has been done to make the enterprise use of storage any smarter. File systems such as CIFS/SMB and NFS were designed to provide an easily understandable, shared model that emulated the simplicity of a filing cabinet, with multiple drawers and folders for storing data. This may have worked in the past, but in today’s extended IT environment, traditional file systems lack the metadata capabilities necessary to provide deeper context and enable programmatic management of unstructured data. With storage growth expected to continue unabated for the foreseeable future, businesses really need a better model for classifying, organizing and utilizing data that spans multiple clouds to provide common policy enforcement and ensure long-term information value.
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