News Article
Rosetta Stone embraces storage virtualization in DevOps shift
July 25, 2016
Mark Moseley, the vice president of Information technology for Rosetta Stone, ran into something of a virtual wall a couple of years ago as the education technology software company shifted to a DevOps programming model.
As the team cloned and backed up databases for test-development environments, it made duplicate copies of the same files and database records. Generating these copies, so-called copy data, required a lot of storage capacity and CPU cycles, boosting computing costs. In addition to the financial impact, waiting for data operations such as refresh and rollback could take days.
Mark Moseley, vice president of information management at Rosetta Stone.Mark Moseley, vice president of information management at Rosetta Stone.
Even so, creating backups that enable disaster recovery is a necessary evil to test new software, the price for running an agile shop. “When it gets to testing, you’ve got to have data on the back end,” Moseley says. He began searching for a solution.
Rosetta Stone’s duplicate data dilemma is not uncommon for companies trying to build, test and refine software faster. IDC estimates the average organization holds as many as 375 data copies, including backups of backups and multiple versions of files. The researcher says copy data comprises as much as 60 percent of what is stored in data centers, costing companies as much as $44 billion to manage worldwide.