Data storage and backup is the technology that decides where a company's data physically sits, and how the company gets that data back when it is lost. Data is stored as bytes on drives: spinning hard disk drives, flash drives or magnetic tape. A backup is a second copy, kept somewhere else, from which the data can be restored. Companies of every kind buy these systems, from hospitals and banks to factories and AI labs.
Consider a hospital chain in Hyderabad. It takes hundreds of X-rays, CT scans and MRIs every day. Each scan is a large file, and the hospital must keep it for years. Here is the path that one day's scans take.
First, each scan is saved. The scanner sends it to the hospital's PACS, the system that stores and displays medical images. The PACS writes the file to storage. Some hospitals buy a sealed enterprise storage system, a box of drives with its own software inside. Others run software-defined storage on ordinary servers. Either way, the storage writes each file to more than one drive. So one failed drive loses nothing. This is called redundancy.
Second, the hospital trains an AI model to spot fractures on X-rays. The model learns on an AI cluster, a group of servers full of GPUs, the chips that run thousands of calculations at once. GPUs are expensive, so they must not sit waiting for data. A parallel file system spreads each file across many storage servers, so that every GPU can read at the same time.
Third, older files move to cheaper places. Scans from five years ago are rarely opened. They go to tape, or to cheap cloud object storage. A cloud file system shows files kept in the cloud to staff as an ordinary shared drive. Cloud storage cost optimisation stops the hospital paying for empty space on the disks it rents in the cloud.
Fourth, everything is copied every night. Backup and recovery software copies the servers and databases. SaaS and endpoint backup copies the doctors' laptops and the hospital's email. Online backup is the same idea for one person's computer, and it is sold mainly in the United States.
Fifth, one night ransomware strikes. Ransomware is software that encrypts a company's files, so that nobody can open them, and then demands money to unlock them. Attackers now try to destroy the backups first. So at least one copy must be out of their reach. An immutable backup cannot be changed or deleted, even with the administrator's password. An air-gapped backup is kept cut off from the network. The hospital restores a clean copy through ransomware recovery, and the scans open again.