Explain the concept of data partitioning in storage systems to improve efficiency and scalability.

Data partitioning (sharding) is a method of distributing data across multiple physical or logical segments to improve the performance and scalability of a storage system.

Main advantages:

• Increased throughput: requests are processed in parallel on different shards.
• Scalability: new nodes with new shards can be added without stopping the system.
• Reduced load on individual nodes: each node stores only a part of the data.

Example: in a user database, data can be divided by geographic attribute — users from different regions are stored on different servers.

It is important to consider a sharding strategy (by key, range, hash) and ensure correct routing of requests to the appropriate parts.