Connect with us

Global Banking and Finance Review is an online platform offering news, analysis, and opinion on the latest trends, developments, and innovations in the banking and finance industry worldwide. The platform covers a diverse range of topics, including banking, insurance, investment, wealth management, fintech, and regulatory issues. The website publishes news, press releases, opinion and advertorials on various financial organizations, products and services which are commissioned from various Companies, Organizations, PR agencies, Bloggers etc. These commissioned articles are commercial in nature. This is not to be considered as financial advice and should be considered only for information purposes. It does not reflect the views or opinion of our website and is not to be considered an endorsement or a recommendation. We cannot guarantee the accuracy or applicability of any information provided with respect to your individual or personal circumstances. Please seek Professional advice from a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. We link to various third-party websites, affiliate sales networks, and to our advertising partners websites. When you view or click on certain links available on our articles, our partners may compensate us for displaying the content to you or make a purchase or fill a form. This will not incur any additional charges to you. To make things simpler for you to identity or distinguish advertised or sponsored articles or links, you may consider all articles or links hosted on our site as a commercial article placement. We will not be responsible for any loss you may suffer as a result of any omission or inaccuracy on the website. .

Technology

TOP STORAGE TRENDS HELP AUTOMATE, SIMPLIFY IT

TOP STORAGE TRENDS

By Robin Kuepers

For many IT managers, storage has become too complex, hard to manage and expensive. According to IDC, businesses’ storage demands are growing in excess of 50 percent a year while their total available storage capacity is growing at half that rate.

TOP STORAGE TRENDS

TOP STORAGE TRENDS

As a result of this, there are a number of trends that are emerging in the storage space to help avoid unnecessary complexity. Automation has long been heralded as a way to simplify IT management and we’re seeing that trend progress as technologies like flash storage and convergence make their stake in the market. So how can IT managers respond to new business demands whilst balancing performance and budget?

Converged solutions offer simplified management, reduced space and costs

According to Forrester, a total of 95 percent of IT leaders and storage admins see value in buying storage from the vendor from which they buy server, networking, system management or IT services. Respondents indicated that a deeper relationship with a smaller number of vendors can build trust, provide technology synergies that ease management, and streamline support relationships, making it easier to manage the big picture. CIOs want to see improved responsiveness from their workloads and their applications. Their priority is how to respond more quickly to their business needs. There has been an obvious shift to buying compute resources driven by an accelerated time to deploy to help address that need.

These desires have led to the birth of converged infrastructures that provide the ability to consolidate servers, storage and networking into an easy-to-manage architecture that can help any company – whether they are a large corporate or SMB – reduce the costs of running applications, speed up the deployment of new infrastructures and most importantly simplify management.

One example has come with the advent of converged infrastructures, possible with innovations such as blade arrays. By converging compute, switching and storage resources into a dense, self-contained form factor, blade arrays can offer a range of capabilities from basic disk arrays to highly automated, virtualized systems that can be customised to address specific applications and environments. These systems can help organisations reduce operating costs through more-efficient use of switching resources, simplified cabling and consolidated management with chassis backplanes. Benefits also include reduced cost of running applications, faster infrastructure deployments, simplicity and speed of management, and improved time-to-value for application and cloud deployments.

It is important however to bear in mind that bundled solutions are not necessarily comprehensive ones. Although convergence and pre-integration can help ensure infrastructure performance, reliability and quality, not all solutions are created or managed equally. Working with a trusted IT partner to deploy a solution that is right for a specific business need or workload is therefore important and critical to success.

The flash revolution

Automated tiering has long been a hit with businesses from a storage standpoint. With this in place, customers are able to manage data when and where they need it, and in a cost-effective way. Before automated tiering, businesses would buy storage that was capable of more performance than they could consume to give them confidence that storage systems would perform as needed. This approach had obvious economic flaws.

As traditional server and storage lines blur, there’s an opportunity to apply automated tiering to server-side flash cache as part of a broader storage infrastructure with flash and various spinning disk types. Flash and other solid-state storage have been gathering momentum quickly as demand for faster response times increases and costs decrease. By taking the innovative approach of tiering, businesses are able to add new capabilities without compromising their existing infrastructure. This solution means that they can have the performance of flash but the safety of disk.

While flash is growing in adoption, the best value is found in tiering with optimisation of every application and every volume to best meet the combination of price and performance. The ability for a storage array to automatically tier across multiple SSD drive types is changing the way that CIOs and businesses are able to manage how data is stored and comes with three big advantages.

Firstly, the balance of multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC) offers customers greater overall cost for performance. Secondly, overall flash reliability is increased when an array uses the more vulnerable MLC flash tier for just reads. Lastly, the capacity of the more expensive SLC tier can be kept to a minimum by being just large enough to handle inbound write traffic. Flash storage comes in various formats and is also being deployed in both all-flash and hybrid – a mix of flash and HDD – models and inside servers (i.e. PCIe cards). As a result, businesses are able to get flash performance when it’s needed, and do so at a price that’s comparable to an all-disk solution.

As the key barrier to flash adoption has been cost, some customers previously have been unsure how to justify cost for the great performance. Therefore, vendors must provide innovative solutions and proper education to help customers make the most of flash in their storage environments.

Compression and deduplication

Compression and deduplication are perfect examples of automated tools that allow for storage provisioning and data distribution to happen autonomously, reducing the need for additional physical IT resources and also freeing existing technical staff to focus on other tasks.

It’s no secret that the amount of data being processed and managed is on the rise, growing at an unprecedented rate for businesses of all sizes. As such, storage capacity can quickly become an issue of concern and an added expense.

Plainly and simply, compression and deduplication are space savers and help to vastly simplify the task of juggling storage resource. Through compression, data shrinks to a state where it can be easily stored for archival purposes, and it “re-hydrates”, or returns to its original larger form, on demand. Through deduplication, only the unique, critical data – as opposed to the pieces of data that are repeatedly found in other files – are stored, reducing the amount of storage capacity used. For example, when storing old email files, deduplication can identify identical attachments that might be repeated several times, and only store one of them while pointing or linking to that single stored attachment at repeat occurrences.

What’s next?

As the data deluge continues to create new challenges, the technology which helps businesses to solve problems while increasing efficiency and saving money is evolving.

Today’s businesses need to look at the big picture and ask themselves if they’re taking advantage of offerings that can ease data headaches and save money in the long-run.

Better managing and maximizing storage is a big first step and Dell is helping businesses of all sizes by redefining the economics of Enterprise Storage.

Global Banking & Finance Review

 

Why waste money on news and opinions when you can access them for free?

Take advantage of our newsletter subscription and stay informed on the go!


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: Global Banking & Finance Review │ Banking │ Finance │ Technology. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Recent Post