What is data storage?

Every piece of information you gather in your business is potentially important. Whether it’s a database of customer accounts and their purchase histories, human resources records for every employee, financial information such as payroll or accounts receivable, or intellectual property such as specifications for your products, that information needs to be stored somewhere so you can access it as needed to operate your business.

Forms of data storage

File storage Also referred to as file-level or file-based storage, this type is presented as files that are stored in folders and subfolders in a directory. If you’ve used a PC and saved a document to the hard drive, for instance, you have experienced file storage. Files are accessible through a path that users must know. File storage is the most common type of storage on computer hard drives and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Block storage Rather than storing data in a complete file, block storage breaks apart data and stores it in blocks that can hold 256 KB up to 4 MB. The blocks are then placed randomly on the storage device – which doesn’t hinder access speeds because each block is tagged with a unique identifier. When a user or application needs a file, the computer queries the block storage system, which rapidly identifies and collects all the needed blocks and reassembles them into a complete file. Block storage is ultra-efficient because it doesn’t use metadata, which takes up room on the storage device. Because it’s so fast, businesses tend to use block storage when they want to scale up quickly and when read/write performance is a critical priority. Object storage This type of data storage separates information into distinct objects with unique identifiers and metadata. It doesn’t form a hierarchy like file storage and is considered “flat.” Metadata is a critical component of object storage and each object can have quite a bit of metadata, such as information about the creator of the data and keywords, as well as policies for security, privacy, and access. Object storage works well with APIs so it’s simple to use with existing software and systems. It also scales very well. It could be spread across hundreds or thousands of devices and locations and still be super speedy because all the data is stored in one namespace. It’s the storage type of choice for public cloud providers, such as AWS, and organizations that deal with a lot of unstructured data such as video files, emails, IoT sensor data, social media content, and more.

Types of data storage solutions

Direct-attached storage (DAS)Network-based storage: NAS and SAN

The importance of data storage

Long-lasting preservation of data – Digital data storage makes it easy to pool large volumes of information for long periods of time. Easier accessibility – Everyone can get the information they need, right from their desktop computers instead of having to physically go to a room full of file cabinets.More efficient data recovery – Stored data is easily backed up by making copies, so recovery is faster and simpler if a file gets lost or corrupted. Smaller physical footprint and easier scalability – There’s no need for physical file cabinets, which take up lots of room over time, and adding more digital capacity is simple.Potentially increased security – For very sensitive data, there are many more ways to secure and protect that information digitally using today’s advanced security tools and features.Easier collaboration across teams – Centrally stored data is accessible to every authorized user and can be accessed and shared among teams as they work together. More efficient document management – It’s easier to categorize and organize data digitally, and it can be done from a computer desktop or other connected device. Enhanced productivity and workflows – Saving data digitally takes less time than printing out physical pages and creating files, which must be stored in file cabinets.

How does data storage work?

When you store data on a computer, the digital information is saved to a device, where it remains until deleted. Storage differs from computer memory in a major way: While you can access information quickly from your computer’s RAM, that data is only available in RAM until your computer is turned off. Data storage, however, retains data whether the computer is powered on or off. That’s how it can store data long-term.Saving data on a computer storage device lets you access that information when you need it. For example, the accounting department can retrieve stored data about employee work hours and use it to carry out bimonthly payroll tasks. A sales rep can pull up information about a customer before a sales call to see recent orders and go over the last visit to remind them of the issues they discussed.

Types of data storage devices

Cloud storageHybrid cloud storageSSD and flash storageBackup storage

What is the best for storing data?

DAS can be a good choice for:Small businesses, branch offices, and home offices that want a cost-efficient solution and don’t need networkingHosting just one application and its dataSecuring and isolating data for compliance purposesSAN can be a good choice for: Large data centers or business-critical applications that need centralized storage resourcesLarge numbers of employees and an IT staff with skills to manage and maintain the solutionApplications that require very high performance, such as transactional databases Hosting large relational databases that need high performanceLarge enterprises that need a high degree of storage scalabilityA fault-tolerant environment for critical applicationsNAS can be a good choice for:Reliable, cost-effective storage for many users that doesn’t compromise performanceLarge volumes of unstructured data that need to be shared among usersApplications that aren’t performance-sensitiveArchiving or backing up dataServers hosting virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and virtual machines (VMs)Cloud storage can be a good choice for: Archiving or backing up data for disaster recoveryData lakes and data analytics platformsApplication development and testing Storing workloads during a data migrationStorage for cloud-native applications and their dataStorage for industry and regulatory complianceIoT and machine learning data

What is the safest form of data storage?

DAS can be considered secure in the sense that a hacker cannot infiltrate a network and carry out an attack. Many removable storage devices such as SSDs, USBs, and so on are considered “air gapped” if they aren’t on a networked system. However, if the device is damaged or lost, the data could be irretrievable. NAS is a fairly common target for hackers. The storage system is only as secure as your network and router, so it’s important for NAS users to take proven security measures such as regular updates, two-factor authentication, single sign-on processes, encryption, and so on. SAN is inherently more secure than NAS because its data protection algorithms stay consistent and because if your LAN is attacked, having your data stored on a separate network keeps it protected. Cloud storage is typically considered the most secure type of data storage because major cloud service providers, such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft have put billions of dollars into making it secure. It’s also secure because providers make multiple copies of your data to create a high degree of redundancy – so if a cloud server goes down, you can still access your data because it’s stored in various servers and locations.

Blog

More Options and Less Complexity with Nutanix Guest Tools’ Newest Features

By Bob Ball

September 7, 2023 | min

The Nutanix Guest Tools™ (NGT) package comes bundled with the Nutanix AOS™ software, and is a critical component for a number of advanced operations, especially where collaboration with Nutanix capabilities and the guest operating system is key. Features include enabling self-service for the VM’s own users to restore specific files from Prism Central™ snapshots, and changing the guest’s network configuration during disaster recovery failovers. These features have made NGT a critical component for customers to get the best interactions between the guest and infrastructure.

In the last couple of AOS releases, there have been two big changes to how NGT can be installed and how the communication between the VM and the infrastructure works, so let’s walk through these changes together and how you may be able to leverage them.

More details can be found in the Prism Central and Prism Element™ documentation in the Nutanix Guest Tools sections.

Improved Communication Method

Historically all communications between NGT in the VM and the CVM have been over SSL from the guest’s VM to the virtual IP of the CVM on port 2074. As connections to the CVM are over the network, this link is secured by SSL and authenticated by client SSL certificates. While this method of connecting between the VM and the CVM is strongly secured, it does still require direct access between the VM and CVM; so in some cases network segmentation or firewalls could prevent this linkage and need security exceptions to ensure continued functionality of NGT.

But now, when you are using AOS 6.6 and the Nutanix AHV® hypervisor, there’s a new, more direct communication method which uses services running on the AHV hosts themselves, avoiding the need for direct network communication from the VM to Prism Element. You can now even enable NGT on VMs that don’t have any network connectivity at all!

This improved communication method does depend on the VM being able to communicate with the AHV host on which it is running, which in turn requires a serial port to be presented to the virtual machine to facilitate this communication. New VMs set up on AOS 6.6 will get this additional hardware added by default, but existing VMs may need a reboot to automatically add the hardware for NGT to use.

Full details on the different communication types, pre-requisites, and how to check which communication type is being used can be found in the Prism Central Infrastructure Guide - but the key points are that with IP-less communication, the VM doesn’t need network access to the CVM, and firewalls or network segmentation can be used to enforce strong separation between the networks.

External Installation of NGT Guest Agent

As part of the drive towards making things simpler for you, we also re-evaluated the installation of NGT within a VM. Nutanix has always provided multiple methods for installing NGT, including a fully-automated solution in Prism Central to allow installation of NGT in batch across large numbers of VMs. This solution does have some requirements around being able to log in to the VM using either WinRM (for Windows) or SSH (for Linux) and while this approach is used by a large number of Nutanix customers, some organisations have policies that make enabling remote access to the VMs using WinRM or SSH difficult. We’ve therefore created a new way to install NGT in AOS 6.7 which can be used to install NGT asynchronously and remove the requirements to set up WinRM or SSH.

Now you can download the latest NGT installer from the Nutanix portal, which enables easy installation through any endpoint management system like Intune, Bigfix, or even a custom system using Ansible to push updates to your VMs. We’ve provided three installers; one for Windows, one for RPM-based distributions and one for DEB-based distributions. Along with providing these, we’ve substantially increased the list of supported guests to include Microsoft Windows® 11 OS, more versions of Ubuntu®, RHEL®, AlmaLinux™ OS, and Rocky Linux™ OS.

As NGT provides advanced functionality, such as self-service file recovery from snapshots, we still require selection and enablement of NGT functionality from Prism Central. This can follow the same flow as the Prism Central-based batch installation, without the requirement to enable WinRM or SSH in the VMs or to provide VM credentials.

More details on how to install NGT can be found in the Prism Central guide and the full list of VM types supported by NGT can be found on the compatibility and interoperability matrix section of the Nutanix portal, with the installers available from the downloads page.

We’ve also got some great things in the future for NGT. At the same time, we’d love to hear from you on what you’d like to see coming up, so please let us know how we can make NGT work better for you!

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