Storage for the Expanding Datasphere

The volume of available data in the world is already immense and growing bigger. To remain competitive in the face of that expansion, businesses in all sectors will need to store and manage not only the increasing volume of incoming data but also its evolving formats, shapes, and styles. MongoDB 4.2 offers its users a solution to this data management and storage challenge by embracing the WiredTiger storage engine, which is uniquely designed to address the growing data deluge.

Data, Data, and More Data

From the dawn of human evolution to the year 2002, the global community had gathered the equivalent of 5 billion gigabytes (GBs) of data (aka ‘information’). That finite bubble of information encapsulated eons of experience, knowledge, capacity, and history. Since 2002, the global volume of data has grown exponentially, and the pace of that growth has sped up significantly:

• The second 5 GB bundle of data was created in the single year of 2003.
• By 2011, the global community was creating additional units of 5 GB of data every two days.
• In 2013, that volume of data was being generated every 10 minutes.

 
In short, the volume of available global data has grown beyond any comparable standard. Data is now measured in terms of zettabytes (ZBs), one of which is the equivalent of a trillion gigabytes, and the prediction is that there will be 175 ZBs of collected data on the planet by the year 2025.

That’s a lot of information that will need to be stored and easily accessed to derive as much value from it as possible.

Where to Put All That Data?

The challenge for most companies is where and how to store all that information, and the reality of the data itself compounds that challenge:

• It won’t be uniform. The vast majority of it will be unstructured, arriving in the form of the many data types (JavaScript, Symbol, string, array, etc.).
• It won’t be organized. As more applications and software programs emerge, additional formats and structures will add to vast data reservoirs, and the data contained within them will only be as accessible as their storage components permit.
• It won’t come from or go to the same locations:
  • Data will stream in from the growing flood of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems, which may also be the end storage device, depending on their usage.
  • Mid-point collectors and transmitters, such as branch offices and cell towers may also impact or alter the data as it travels across networks.
  • ‘Final’ storage solutions such as cloud servers and data centers will need to accept, process, store, and access this data if users are to gain any value from it at all.

The message of all this information is that your data storage capacities are about to become really – really – important.

MongoDB 4.2 and WiredTiger

Back at iteration 3.0, WiredTiger became the data storage solution of choice for MongoDB products. WiredTiger is a stand-alone, OpenSource data storage engine designed to extrapolate all the values of the relational database management system for non-relational data management opportunities. The performance of each of its three storage engines is designed based on specific workloads, so they function differently from each other depending on the needs of the client. Each, therefore, offers unique advantages:

• The WiredTiger storage engine makes storage more efficient by using multiple technologies, including gzip, Snapp, and prefix compressions. Both internal and file cache systems provide optimal memory usage. This engine is also highly scalable, allowing concurrent writes and reads.
• The Log Structured Merge Tree Based engine facilitates quick handling of large quantities of data and is exceptionally well suited for tiered storage. Flash-based SSDs provide enhanced performance, too, and improved compression and storage efficiencies save storage space.
• The B-Tree storage engine facilitates low latencies and high through-puts and can grow wide and shallow to limits the number of traversed nodes. Interior storage nodes are maintained at half full all the time to reduce waste.

Why Improve your Data Storage?

The growing global data reservoir not only offers more information; it also offers more ways to use that information. Your enterprise data will drive its future success when it’s fully integrated with emerging AI, IoT, and analytics processing. WiredTiger and MongoDB 4.2 are the tools you’ll need to harness all its glory. Datavail is the service provider you’ll need to migrate and integrate your new data storage options. As a MongoDB Premier Partner we can help get you there.