The data that is growing is unstructured: CommVault

The data boom is becoming a flood but much of that data is unstructured, according to CommVault global chief operating officer, Alan Bunte.

Bunte visited Australia recently, where he shared his insights into the growing volumes of data at businesses, both locally and worldwide.

Although Bunte is unable to identify what exactly is the biggest culprit behind the data explosion, he highlights that unstructured data created by machines "grows very quickly".

“The other issue is that that the data is becoming more complex, particularly the infrastructures you are dealing with,” he said.

A popular trend Bunte has seen these days is for businesses to keep a good share of pertinent data on-premise for a couple of days, and big chunks of unexpected data get pushed to the Cloud.

“That dynamic changes almost every single day, so if you’re not on top of it, it is almost out of control,” he said.

Indexing the data

CommVault aims to stay on top of the data grow trend by sticking to its mantra of "just making one copy".

Bunte said people in the past had copies for disaster recovery, replication, snapshots, backup, and archive, but that is changing.

“Traditionally, those were the people who would make their own copies,” he said.

“Our idea was just to do that once, and the magic to it is in the indexing layer.”

Bunte said the best way to manage data for recovery or content application is to know what the data is.

“Almost all of the competitive offerings out there, such as cheap storage, primary believe that it is too expensive to index the data,” he said.

When the data is read, it is better that it gets categorised into what it is, where it came from, and what the content was.

However, Bunte admits that not all data is created the same.

“It does not have the same recovery profiles or access requirements,” he said.

Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.