As your business goes after new revenue opportunities, an outmoded data storage infrastructure can be a roadblock. It can also inhibit expansion while continually hitting you hard in your operating and capital expense budgets. Because the traditional data center model is complex, built on multiple vendor and technology resources, it can be also costly in terms of down time, IT resources, and diminished business agility.
Here’s an example of what I mean: Let’s say an organization needs to react quickly to an unexpected event (like the sudden need for more data storage due to a change in regulations). Not having the ability to easily expand and scale up can back the IT team into an expensive corner. Your high-value team may be forced to cobble together a costly upgrade that limits consistency and predictability while driving up maintenance expenses and risk. As things get more complex—and costlier—in the data center, IT flexibility becomes more constrained.
As an IT leader, your objective should be to build a cost-effective and agile data infrastructure that aligns with larger business goals.
Go with a Software-Based Storage strategy
A recent Gartner research report, Top Five Use Cases and Benefits of Software-Defined Storage, shares the data that confirms “leaders are looking for software-defined storage products that offer the potential for better total cost of ownership, efficiency, and scalability to address exponential-data growth needs and to benefit from innovations from hardware and software players independently.” Gartner also predicts that by 2019, approximately 30% of the global storage array capacity installed in enterprise data centers will be deployed with software-defined storage or hyperconverged integrated system architectures based on x86 hardware systems, a significant increase from less than 5% today.
In addition, the research firm Neuralytix recommends that “All organizations need to include software-defined storage as part of their forward-looking IT planning.”
Our own 2017 SDS survey validates the analyst reports and highlights that forward-thinking leaders are making SDS a business priority.
How SDS delivers on value
Adopting a software-based approach that goes beyond adding flash to the data storage infrastructure has the potential to empower your organization with better application performance. It can also give you the agility, scalability and flexibility needed to seamlessly adopt new technologies. Another key benefit of a software-defined storage (SDS) strategy is that it helps ensure your data is highly available, easily accessible and supports unbroken business continuity.
A single view of all your data storage resources
Did you know that most data centers have on average from three to eight storage vendors? When you create an SDS data center using storage virtualization software, it creates an integration layer across disparate storage hardware, server and storage network resources — letting you manage them all through a single console.
Virtualization software lets you query and access data across your network, wherever it resides—in the cloud and on premises across various sources and systems, including hardware. As a result, your IT team has a “universal access” environment without ever physically moving the data. This virtual data layer and a unified view across the entire enterprise network — delivering enterprise-grade data availability, scalability, and performance. A SDS approach delivers significant advantages from a simplified, efficient, and easier to manage environment that also improves performance of enterprise applications and supports new business initiatives.
Hardware matters
When you have best-in-class hardware combined with data virtualization software, you can see dramatic efficiency and performance improvements. The Lenovo DX8200D appliance powered by DataCore™ allows you to bring the benefits of software-defined technologies to block and file storage for faster performance while simplifying operations. This plug and play solution provides easy scalability and single pane management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems—without trade-offs in availability, reliability or functionality.
Powering the Lenovo DX8200D, DataCore SANsymphony™ software is a comprehensive and scalable storage services platform designed to maximize the performance, availability and utilization of your IT assets, no matter how diverse they may be, or what topology you’ve chosen. The integrated set of centrally managed data protection, provisioning, caching, replication and migration functions operate uniformly over different models and brands of storage equipment, helping you to seamlessly manage current and future technologies. Find out why this combination of software and Lenovo server can elevate your data storage infrastructure—and your business to the next level of performance.
Download the Lenovo DX8200D Technical Brief or click here for more information!
