Enterprises in every industry are undergoing digital transformation to modernize and update their existing IT infrastructures. New digital technology is being integrated at all levels, fundamentally changing workflows and IT processes.
Because of the new technology, many enterprises are finding they need a high-end storage solution that is more agile and flexible to change than options that have previously been available.
HPE Primera is one such solution. In this first part of a two-part article series, we will discuss the limitations of current high-end storage solutions and how HPE Primera is built to overcome them.
Current high-end storage options
Most current high-end storage systems are considered complex and in general, have a reputation for being difficult or time consuming to manage. They typically have built-in storage management services that allow for mixed workloads and redundancies to ensure data is stored safely. But this, along with other aspects of current high-end storage offerings, create management complexity that often means they require extensive experience to install, configure and manage. As a result, senior members of IT teams must attend to these duties, pulling them away from other important projects.
Additionally, even for these experienced IT professionals, technology upgrades to current high-end storage systems are no walk in the park. These upgrades often require manual data migration, an arduous task, and incremental upgrades to firmware, which typically require OS updates each time a software update is made. Overall, it’s a tiresome process with many opportunities for human error.
As far as the performance of current high-end storage offerings, many of these solutions have system architectures that cannot keep up with modern requirements, such as the parallelization needed to optimize performance of solid-state media. As a result, performance may not be consistent, leading to costly downtime and more work needed to manually retune or distribute the workload.
These problems, and more, all add to the concerns about the management of high-end storage systems. As enterprises undergo digital transformations, IT is also changing, with many storage tasks moving from senior IT team members to IT generalists, who often do not have the training or experience to properly manage current high-end storage systems.
How HPE Primera address high-end storage concerns
With extensive experience as an IT infrastructure provider, HPE is well-equipped to tackle the challenges of high-end storage systems.
HPE Primera prioritizes management simplicity, scaling and flexibility to offer the power and performance that enterprises need, without bogging down IT departments.
The solution is optimized for solid state storage and supports massive parallelism. By utilizing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) that have been optimized for internode concurrency, HPE Primera can support up to four controllers. Additional features, such as on-disk data protection and a self-healing erasure-coded data layout, have also been modified to prioritize parallelism on a massive scale.
For IT teams, HPE Primera offers comprehensive monitoring through HPE InfoSight, which can collect and analyze data to predict and automatically resolve system issues. Through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, InfoSight collects metrics from across the system to create a global view whenever it is needed. This global view offers IT teams better insight into the system as a whole, which leads to better project prioritization. Additionally, IT teams can set up policies for the system, or specify that InfoSight should only suggest actions, offering flexibility and the ability for administrators to be as involved as needed.
Additionally, the HPE Primera storage OS is built around a service-centric design that allows for upgrades as necessary, without downtime. By prioritizing this, HPE has created a high-end storage solution that is easier for IT to manage and has less opportunity for human error, or other risks common in current high-end storage systems.
Ready to learn more About HPE Primera?
HPE Primera is redefining high-end storage to ensure that modern needs are being met as simply and easily as possible. Problems that plagued legacy systems, such as risky upgrades and complex management systems, are fixed through intelligent design to keep enterprises going strong through their digital transformations. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.
