As promised in my previous post, 4 Must-follow Tips to Save the Day with Software-Defined Storage – Part 1, I’d like to follow up on two final tips for how to make software-defined storage your super-hero!
Challenge: Budgets are tight, while data is growing quickly
Data is growing really fast, doubling every two to four years, but storage budgets are not. Budgets are growing at less than 3% per year and storage capacity is growing about 25% year-over-year, so how can that work?
This disconnect is happening because there are more sources of data than ever before, and this data is being kept for longer periods of time. Some recommendations advise you to keep your data as long as possible and have it readily available at any time, but from a capacity perspective, that can get really expensive. If you need to store all the data that has been requested, then you need to be way more efficient.
Tip #3: Reduce your storage costs
Slash those unnecessary storage costs. How? By avoiding storage hardware vendor lock-in. Our software-defined storage solution is hardware agnostic. It gives you the freedom to buy from any hardware vendor, putting you in a better position to negotiate the best deal for your business. This means greater buying power to make your budget go further. Secondly, our software lets you optimize the utilization of your existing storage resources, extending the time between each hardware refresh. This means that you can get the most from the hardware you already own before buying more. Finally, our software allows you to future-proof your storage. It lets you bring in new storage technologies non-disruptively, so you can be ready to integrate whatever comes next, without throwing out what you already have. So if you want to stop that ‘rip and replace’ cycle other storage vendors might be pushing, this is the best solution for you. Now that’s how you optimize the economics of storage.
Challenge: Silos of storage prevent agility and simplicity
Managing storage silos can become quite a headache. That’s because if you have silos, each one must be managed individually, and you can’t share any of the storage capacity or services across them. Bottom line, if the storage hardware is not interoperable, then it’s just contributing to additional management complexity. Additionally, if you are managing different kinds of infrastructure, each with its own type of storage services, with the same staff, training can become quite a task.
Tip #4: Remove the walls between your storage silos
Say goodbye to your storage silos. Our software-defined storage solution allows you to pool all your storage capacity and enable different infrastructure to communicate with each other and move data anywhere you want to. Also, by moving storage services like compression and deduplication from the hardware into our software layer, you now can provide all those services consistently across your entire infrastructure. All this can be done with the benefits of centralized management because our solution centralizes provisioning, data protection, control and monitoring of distributed storage resources through a single management console.
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