High-end storage redefined for the decade ahead
Rise of big data and altering end-user demand means the high-end storage space is undergoing significant change.
Corporates today are modernising their systems to harness digital transformation opportunities by way of revolutionary IT infrastructure changes which is resulting in the high-end storage landscape dramatically shifting. Organisations are seeing the opportunities of big data and hyper-converged infrastructure to help facilitate growth and differentiation.
The new demand frontier
As corporates look to leverage data as a strategic advantage, there are now a host of new high-end storage requirements.
One essential is agility, which is often difficult to achieve with legacy storage systems. But, with cloud technologies now so widely available, this seen as the leading light in allowing businesses the nimbleness to harness data.
Storage performance and higher availability are also in greater demand today, as businesses want to inform their decision-making through a robust, secure and accessible infrastructure network.
Businesses also require increased scalability, improved efficiencies, and easier manageability of their storage systems, maintaining consistency will enable businesses to grow with technology instead of being outgrown by technology.
Fresh challenges
Customer demand for high performance storage with scalability, availability and functionality presents a haul of additional challenges for your IT infrastructure.
High-end storage which requires such aspects can quickly present a complex solution, with expert knowledge required to manage such sophisticated systems.
There are also challenges over the concept of systems needing constant tuning to maintain pace with application changes, causing knock-on effects for performance as updates take place.
Technology upgrades to storage systems can also be risky and time-consuming, with data migrations and upgrades to firmware causing numerous issues for businesses.
Lastly, let’s not forget there is the notion that outdated technology might be unable to handle such upgrades and will hinder workload consolidation.
New definition of high-end storage
If the gap between new high-end storage demand and the challenges it creates are to be bridged, there needs to be a modernised definition of what high-end storage encompasses for the coming decade.
Discussing the need to reset expectations for high-end storage, research house IDC stated in a white paper that with agility as a requirement for digitally transforming enterprises, the design of high-end storage systems needs to change.
“The more purpose-built, statically defined scale-up designs of the past need to give way to more software-defined, modular scale-out designs,” IDC’s white paper [1] stated.
IDC went on to claim that systems that were originally designed and optimised assuming the use of hard disk drives (HDD) must to be optimised to take advantage of the latest solid state (SSD) storage technologies.
Systems also need to be designed to operate in hybrid cloud environments, since “this is clearly the blueprint for how IT infrastructure will be deployed going forward”.
HPE Primera
The response from HPE to this realignment of the high-end storage space is HPE Primera for mission-critical apps.
The view of HPE is that businesses need to accelerate everything, but traditional high-end storage is unable keep up. HPE Primera delivers extreme resiliency and performance with the agility of the cloud.
AI for infrastructure offering, HPE InfoSight, is embedded into HPE Primera to optimise performance and workload placement in real time. HPE Primera features a multi-node, all-active platform, while it allows for self-install and upgrades which drives up resiliency.
HPE Primera focuses on mission-critical reliability and comes standard with a 100% data availability guarantee (now that is some reassurance). It is consumed with a fully managed, pay-as-you-go experience and it scales data elastically with the needs of a business.
It also has a unique ownership experience with all-inclusive licensing, non-disruptive controller upgrades, efficiency and uptime guarantees, flat support pricing and flexible consumption options.
IDC state: “The HPE Primera system architecture demonstrates an intelligent approach to leveraging newer technologies and concepts in storage infrastructure to create highly scalable, highly available systems that can largely self-manage themselves to policies established by administrators.”
As we embark into 2020, a new decade, we will continue to see high-end storage demands escalate. Businesses will be looking at the opportunities that big data and hyper-converged infrastructure provide, and must ensure they have the high-end storage products to match their ambitions.
Sources –
[1] IDC: HPE Primera Resets Expectations for High-End Storage, IDC White Paper, June 2019
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