What is data storage?
Data storage is recording digital information in a storage medium such as a hard disk, a company server, a cloud-based storage system, a data warehouse or a data lake.
The storage medium depends on the amount of data to be stored. The chosen storage medium must guarantee the integrity of data while keeping it secure and accessible.
How can you store data?
Traditionally, businesses stored data on-premise, using in-house physical equipment and a dedicated IT team responsible for their management.
With large volumes of data, an on-premise setup becomes expensive, complicated and it requires highly sophisticated systems (which, you guessed it, cost more 💸).
That's why large companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook have their own data centers to store data.
An increasingly popular alternative to on-premise data storage is distributed storage on cloud. Distributed systems are popular as they're cheaper, flexible and more accessible.
What is a distributed storage system?
A distributed storage system uses cloud technology to store data on several different computers. You can store data on multiple systems, which divide the computing load and increase data processing speed.
Nodes are the building blocks of distributed systems—this is where you can store and process data. A collection of several nodes is a cluster.
As a result, you can analyze data faster at an affordable price. Since you're using the cloud, you don't have to invest in hardware or physical spaces for maintaining data storage systems on-premise.
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