Waste is never a good thing. And rumblings of an economic downturn, alongside dire warnings of climate change, are making it increasingly necessary to address waste. As a society, we need to reduce consumption, data included.
First, we all must acknowledge the high cost of data. Despite the prevailing opinion of the 2010s, data isn’t free. There’s a monetary and carbon cost to keeping data alive.
Let’s look at storing one gigabyte of data, about the size of an hour-long video or 20 minutes of social media scrolling. Transferring and storing this data consumes an estimated 7 Kilowatt-hours (kWh). Now consider that we humans create and consume a collective 74 zettabytes of data (a lot more than a gig), and it’s stored in millions of global data centers, some sitting on a few hundred acres of land.
The costs are apparent, but because many in the tech industry have buried their heads in the sand instead of addressing mounting environmental pressures, data storage efficiency has largely been neglected. Too many tech vendors choose to look the other way and take a “more the merrier” approach to data storage.
With data velocity only increasing (and financial and environmental pressures following), what’s the answer? How can enterprises adopt effective technology while reducing data consumption?
We’ve covered the bad news: data storage burns through a tremendous amount of resources. The good news is: some technology vendors (Moogsoft included) take significant steps toward building and maintaining green technology.
Why structured vs. unstructured data matters
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solutions ingest and analyze data from across a customer’s IT ecosystem to ensure the availability of its apps and services. At Moogsoft, we provide advanced AIOps and do the upfront work to structure the data, ensuring the format is predefined before going into storage.
Why do all of the work to structure monitoring data?
The process is harder but the answer is simple. You can’t delete unstructured data. When information is stored in its native format, vendors and customers wind up holding on to data forever — just because it may have future use.
As a society, we can’t afford to support this wasteful mindset any longer.
Why data lakes inspire waste
Unlike many AIOps vendors, Moogsoft’s solution was born out of making sense of data in motion. In other words, our technology is designed to extract the operationally significant context from data. We retain that context while disposing of the useless information. So, the vast majority of data that passes through our system isn’t stored.
The counter approach would be relying on data lakes where massive amounts of structured and unstructured data live in a central repository. Not only is this an intrinsically wasteful way of thinking about data management, but data lakes also create a scalability problem.
Many vendors in the AIOps market spend more time noodling on how to store more and more data instead of focusing on how to extract meaning from the data. Essentially, those vendors make a bad problem (data storage) worse (needing more and more data storage).
Why moving from Splunk to Moogsoft saves resources
Customers sometimes need to keep data based on data retention regulations. But vendors like Splunk encourage data storage far beyond those special cases. And here’s why: Splunk’s licensing schema bakes in data storage costs, so the entire business model is predicated on storing data the customer doesn’t need.
Some non-data lake vendors offering real-time monitoring platforms like ServiceNow and Big Panda have another weakness. They’re less parsimonious about the data they retain because their correlation capabilities aren’t strong. While these platforms hold on to excess data, Moogsoft features an advanced correlation engine that stores minimal data while providing quick, actional outcomes.
In other words, Moogsoft is the antidote to wasteful data lakes.
Moogsoft saves another finite resource: money. We converge both time series and event data, giving the customer two products for the price of one. But it’s more than that. Because we converge all data into one platform, we tell the story one time and avoid data duplication.
If you’re looking to tread a little lighter on the planet and shave some expenses (without sacrificing monitoring quality), you may want to take Moogsoft’s holistic AIOps solutions for a free 14-day test drive. Our advanced AIOps platform will guarantee your technology’s availability and might even make you feel better about your impact on the world too.
