Buyer Choice, Open Standards Drive Down Costs

Buyer choice and open standards keep driving down costs. Selecting IT solutions and technology partners that accommodate open standards and choice in IT decisions is imperative to develop a flexible infrastructure that can meet unique workload demands and budgetary guidelines. Once you buy into a proprietary system that mandates specialized hardware and software, you are locked in, limiting options greatly.

With the emergence of the Internet, countless numbers of many different types of data queries can take place instantly and continuously. The demand for data accessibility immediately translated into the enterprise workplace. The pace and complexity of data-driven businesses has created unprecedented workload challenges for IT. Recognizing data as a propellant for competitive advantage requires the CIO to provide the enterprise with an infrastructure able to cope with larger workloads on a faster basis.

Data infrastructure is in many ways mimicking the evolution of the networking industry. Once installed, data storage—much like a network—needs to work without disruption, even as old elements fail or become obsolete and new ones are added. It should scale from tiny to giant as your company grows and as Moore’s Law makes everything bigger and faster.

In the past five years, VMware drove the same transformation in thinking about virtualized servers that the cloud is now driving for data storage systems. The ability to nondisruptively move applications between networks, servers and now storage provides tremendous agility to the business, enabling rapid deployment of new IT services and far greater operating efficiency.

Storage no longer needs to be captive to a single specific storage device. IT departments can tailor data flows to work with specific applications in on-premise, virtual and cloud environments.

Data sharing has become much more common. It is now often networked or even part of a large cloud infrastructure, creating a whole host of new IT challenges. Implementing a shared virtual infrastructure gives you the best of both worlds with secure data management and ease of content access through virtualized machines.

With storage capacity requirements increasing at exponential rates, NAND flash storage continues to gain popularity as a powerful complement to traditional hard-disk storage. Today’s system architects must balance how flash is used within their organizations to maximize performance and dynamically scale to the needs of the future.

With more users accessing work-related content from multiple devices, coupled with demands from high-performance workloads, IT decision makers have to anticipate the needs of the future. Thus, seamless scale-up of data infrastructures is critical.

Businesses need agility in IT to meet changing performance and computing demands to supply a nondisruptive IT environment. Every year, enterprise computing requires higher performance and larger storage footprints to efficiently store and retrieve data.

An agile data infrastructure is the essential building block for enterprises to create a new-generation storage system that yields 100 percent uptime. Using clustered storage, IT infrastructure can scale without limits, operate with zero downtime and intelligently integrate with diversified IT environments, from cloud to dedicated architectures to ensure optimal efficiency.