How New-Gen Flash Can Improve Enterprises’ Business

by Chris Preimesberger

While the data center is the lifeblood of every digital business, the heart of every new-gen data center is servers and data storage. This is foundational for a successful IT strategy, supporting myriad needs of the performance-intensive, next-generation system required to modernize and propel digital businesses and gain a competitive edge. From highly responsive virtual desktops to increased database processing and faster time to insight, to accelerated enterprise applications, all-flash storage has the performance and efficiencies required to keep business-critical operations moving and functioning optimally.

Achieving competitive advantage in the data-driven, mobile-first business world requires speed and agility. For companies that implement all-flash storage, the agility benefits can be game-changing. NAND flash, which offers a tenfold performance improvement over disk-based storage, improves operational efficiency, reduces provisioning times and provides faster time to market for products and services and enhanced customer experiences.

All-flash storage arrays shrink the overall data footprint, reducing the associated rackspace required to house them. For companies migrating from legacy disk-based storage, this means a system the size of a sub-zero freezer can be consolidated into one that’s the size of a microwave oven, freeing up precious data center real estate.

An all-flash storage system that has been purpose-built to exploit flash to the fullest requires much less storage maintenance, freeing up employees to focus on more strategic initiatives and creating greater IT efficiency. Companies with strong virtualization administration teams can even absorb storage administration duties.

Data-driven businesses are grappling with increasing data growth year over year. Moving to an all-flash storage system that uses a stateless architecture and scale-up, non-disruptive capacity expansion can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future technology upgrades and reduce downtime and data loss risk.

Forward-thinking businesses are looking for ways to reduce IT waste and shrink their carbon footprints in the process. Moving to an all-flash storage system can significantly cut IT energy requirements, resulting in reduced power and cooling costs and lowered storage total cost of ownership and operating expenses.

Business continuity is a function that no CIO can afford to leave to chance. Every CIO wants to ensure that the business is protected, but the options available are complex, costly and hard to manage in the event of a disaster—simply because that they aren’t used that much. With an all-flash system that provides asynchronous replication, space-efficient snapshots and policy-based automation, businesses can have confidence in native, data-reduction-optimized disaster recovery built in to their storage systems.

Flash storage provides something else today’s businesses need: resiliency. Resiliency matters because as a business ages, it will have new needs, such as required software upgrades or expanding its storage arrays to scale along with growth. Flash is the only storage technology that offers businesses the resilience they need to meet these challenges over time.

Flash storage also brings financial advantage to the business in the form of extended depreciation. Since all-flash arrays offer enhanced scalability and greater longevity, they also provide a business model that extends depreciation from three years to up to seven and beyond. Having a longer-term depreciation strategy greatly reduces annual depreciation expenses and directly raises income and earnings per share. Chief financial officers love this.

CIOs who view storage as a strategic investment and prioritize implementation of an all-flash system will be heralded as heroes once the company starts to realize the enormous benefits to their data center and IT operations, enterprise applications, customer experiences, and ultimately, the company’s bottom line.