//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// t cht lk
“
ENTERPRISE IT
LEADERS ARE
FACING CRITICAL
DECISIONS ON
HOW TO BUILD
A DCA.
and the pressure it places on storage
performance, spinning disks are not a viable
option for such deployments. To understand
which application(s) should go on all-flash
storage first, it is important to:
• Take stock of your own requirements,
applications and budget considerations,
and identify those workloads that are
causing the most pain or providing the
best opportunity to use all-flash storage to
drive measurable business improvements
• Take the time to understand the benefits
of all-flash storage solutions and how
they can be applied to enhance and
strengthen these particular applications
and workloads
• Evaluate leading all-flash solutions and
determine which features, functions and
pricing models will maximise your ability
to modernise these workloads and begin
your journey to the all-flash cloud
Consolidation – Putting more
applications on All-Flash Storage
The introduction of flash prompted an
evolution of the storage market. Initially flash
was seen as a premium technology, reserved
for tier-1 use cases. Now flash technology is
a must-have and has eliminated the need to
silo data in different places. Historically, you
had hot and cold data.
Hot data is the data you want immediate
access to, often running real-time analysis
or AI protocols on to extract insight and
value. Cold data was simply stored for
recoverability purposes, typically on disk or
even tape storage. Having these different
tiers of storage led to increased complexity,
cost and inefficiency.
www.intelligentcio.com
Today, utilising the market’s leading-edge
all-flash technologies, these categories
can be eliminated as all data can be
consolidated into one place, ready for
AI and real-time analysis. Organisations
with decades worth of cold data on
legacy storage can migrate to all-flash
arrays, making it available for immediate
AI processing. In this way you can heat
up data that was previously cold, often
uncovering new value and insight through
AI or Machine Learning.
By consolidating your data into one place,
you also maximise many cost savings
including lower energy consumption and
less floor space use, reduced software
licensing fees, and further savings through
deduplication and compression over more
applications and workloads. In addition, you
do not need to deal with the consequences
of data gravity, where data has to be moved
from one data island to another, a lengthy
and often expensive process.
Build your cloud on all-flash storage
As you move from your first all-flash
applications through consolidation and
toward the all flash cloud, an important
step will be to bridge the virtualisation gap
between your servers and the rest of your
infrastructure, namely storage and networking.
This is another area where your all-
flash architecture can play a critical role
in providing the flexibility, agility and
management simplicity required for a
successful cloud deployment. What are
you trying to accomplish? If you start with
delivering basic cloud-type services, your
must-have list would include:
• The ability to share resources through
simple and automated processes:
Users should be able to go straight to
your on-premises cloud and choose the
storage capacity and performance they
need, for as long as they need it
• Automated metering and
chargebacks: Once users have chosen
the resources they want, the cloud
infrastructure should be able to meter
their usage and create an automated
chargeback mechanism, so they only
pay for what they actually used
• Elastic scalability: Once resources are
used, they go back into the pool and
Christian Putz, Director, Emerging Markets,
EMEA, at Pure Storage
become available to other users and
departments. As storage capacity and
performance requirements grow, the
storage platform should be simple to
upgrade, update and scale
The cloud and all-flash storage are two of
the most important innovations driving
the next generation of data-centric
architectures. While it may seem at first
that these are parallel trends, in reality they
are inextricably intertwined.
Without the benefits of all-flash storage –
driving new levels of performance, agility,
elasticity and management simplicity –
enterprises would not be able to modernise
their infrastructures to deliver data-as-a-
service, on-demand. It is no coincidence
that the largest hyperscale cloud providers
rely on all-flash storage solutions as their
storage foundation.
You can take the cloud journey in stages,
starting small with a single application or
two, and then adding more applications
through consolidation and virtualisation. You
can also implement multiple stages at once.
With all-flash storage, you can do everything
you are doing now, only better, faster
and simpler, with more agility and more
resilience. You may choose to go slowly, or
you can go big – all the way to the cloud. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
101