When it comes to challenges faced by today’s IT organizations, there are few as universal as data management. In the last two decades, the volume of data that enterprises are expected to utilize, secure, and manage has increased exponentially. The location of that data has also changed, with much of it moving to the cloud or hybrid environments.
Enterprises in the midst of digital transformations all eventually come upon the same situation: What to do about storage? For most, the answer is flash storage.
People nationwide are starting to return to work with some version of familiar normalcy emerging as states open up their economies. Work as we know it has forever changed, though, and some companies are proving to be well equipped for the future while others are still struggling with how to adapt and effectively plan for what's next. Flexible, scalable systems proved to be a saving grace for business continuity, but what else is needed should a mandatory quarantine happen again? While there is a second wave of COVID-19 predicted, it is more critical than ever for executives and IT leaders to reflect on how their business responded—what worked and what didn't—and develop long-term strategies to get ahead of potential supply chain delays and hardware scarcity scenarios.
Among other concerns brought on by changes in workflow and the need to scale a remote operation, many enterprises are now facing dwindling storage capacities without a clear avenue to expand. For others that had storage upgrades planned in the first half of 2020, suddenly they were faced with a new reality that shipment delays are going to delay their upgrades, possibly affecting major business units and corporate revenue goals.
Change is inevitable but, for the IT industry in recent years, it’s been nothing short of significant and disruptive. The era of big data is providing enterprises significant opportunities to make better-informed business decision by leveraging analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies.
WEI often works with clients in both areas of backup and disaster recovery at the same time. We find it’s often beneficial for them to be part of a single strategy since the function of backup and DR relates so closely together (recovering from some sort of event). They do have slightly different goals, however. With backup, you might be looking at a smaller data loss, such as accidental deletion or corruption of files.
We all make mistakes. Some of them have consequences that are more lasting than others are. When it comes to choosing a data storage solution, you can make many common scale-out mistakes. These mistakes can turn your new data storage infrastructure into the gift that keeps on giving. One of the biggest challenges when purchasing data storage is predicting how much storage capacity you really need. It is the most fundamental of considerations. Failing to account for future data growth will leave you scrambling to purchase additional storage sooner than you want to. However, it is just as detrimental to pay for more storage than you need in the near term, especially if that extra space is never used. Overpaying for storage today ties up capital that can be better utilized investing in current opportunities that can return value to your organization.
The driver that wins the big race does not get as much credit for the win if he simply drove the fastest car on the track. After all, logic says the driver should win. A recent trend in data storage has been to migrate to all flash array storage solutions. Flash drives are certainly faster than HDD disks. For those enterprises that implement AFA storage arrays, performance is definitely fast, which it should be using the logic of the fastest racecar. However, there are companies that are achieving ultrafast performance without having to pay the premium price for high performance storage media. Now that is real innovation.
Some purchases require more planning than others do. This is certainly true when it comes to investing in a data storage solution. While applications may come and go, your company’s data lives on. Your data drives the majority of your business operations. One can argue that outside of your Internet gateway, no other facet of the data center has a greater impact on business operations and workloads.
Enterprises are increasingly realizing the value of their data, and are capturing as much of it as possible to glean whatever insights they can. The challenge, however, is that IT budgets are not growing at the rates needed to properly handle these growing mountains of digital gold.
