Many organizations today have adopted a cloud first strategy to bring agility to their business. Line of business owners and DevOps teams value the simplicity, self-service, and automation capabilities that this cloud experience gives them.
Recent research from ESG also shows that 88% of organizations have a strong desire to bring cloud-native applications on-premises. So we’re increasingly seeing a shift to have more and more applications on-premises. The big question for companies like yours? How can you get cloud operational agility that’s self-service and on-demand – via invisible infrastructure – that anyone can manage from anywhere?
You demand the cloud experience on-premises. But what does that entail? Let’s look at three requirements for your on-premises data infrastructure that will enable you to get the operational experience of the cloud.
Instantly provision workloads at scale
On average, it takes 1.5 days to provision storage, as determined by ESG via a recent research study. During that time, IT admins are forced to work through spreadsheets to figure out the capacity and performance headroom across their storage fleet. Plus, work-tickets have to be created and handoffs made manually across the organization to get storage capacity provisioned. It’s an extremely complex and time-consuming task for your IT teams.
Also, because of this lengthy provisioning period, your developers can’t access the storage capacity at the pace they’re expected to. Developers can get storage capacity in the cloud in seconds to start testing their applications; if they’re forced to wait around a day and half, time is wasted and developers are stuck in limbo. This means that application testing and development is delayed, which is going to slow down business momentum.
What your organization innovators need is a self-service infrastructure that enables instant provisioning for your IT admins, app owners, and developers – who can all operate without the need for storage expertise. This true cloud provisioning model will accelerate application development cycles – without being bogged down by provisioning complexity – demanded by today’s fast paced DevOps and CI/CD pipeline processes.
Now with HPE Alletra powered by the Data Services Cloud Console, your teams can instantly provision workloads at scale with intent-based provisioning. Intent-based provisioning determines where your data should be stored – with real-time context to resource headroom and app-specific SLAs – to optimize your resources. It’s AI-driven and self-service, so your IT admins only need to specify the workload type, capacity, and host group needed to access workloads.
Intent-based Provisioning reduces provisioning down to minutes. This means time savings for admins, as well as faster application cycle-time for your developers – which accelerates your data-driven transformation.
Consume storage as-a-service
It’s no secret that your data is constantly growing, challenging your IT teams to efficiently manage the infrastructure that stores it. But acquiring and integrating more infrastructure at a moment’s notice isn’t so easy. It’s a challenge for your hardware to keep up with the unpredictability of your business’ demand. IT admins aren’t able to predict what resources they’ll need, and it takes time to procure, configure, and deploy capacity. This just isn’t an efficient way to work, and slows down the organization’s innovation.
Also, there are significant CAPEX costs, burdening your finance teams to manage cash flow with large upfront payments. The cloud leverages an OPEX model to smooth out these payments, leaving more cash available each month for other purposes.
But now – you can think of true storage as-a-service, which is ideal for unpredictable data growth. For agility, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness, infrastructure should be delivered as-a-service with cloud operations from deploy, provision, manage, to upgrade – and the flexibility to elastically scale on-demand.
With HPE GreenLake for HPE Alletra, IT can shift from owning and maintaining data infrastructure to simply utilizing it on-demand and as-a-service. This means that you can free up your cash flow and increase financial agility with flexible consumption as-a-service. Buffered capacity through HPE GreenLake means you can instantly scale resources without having to worry about having unpredictable new resource demands – saving you time and money to focus on the things that matter most to your business.
Manage from anywhere
Managing the lifecycle of on-premises infrastructure is difficult. Managing the lifecycle of a fleet of on-premises infrastructure, all with different systems, is extremely challenging. For example, an IT administrator of a regional hospital group may manage 17 different hospitals. To check on the capacity for each, the admin would have to VPN into every hospital to check capacity; in the worst case scenario – they would have to drive to the site to troubleshoot and upgrade by extending new services. What’s even more arduous is having to manage software that manages these activities for on-premises storage. Each management tool has separate manual processes, as well as best practices that the storage admin has to understand and know how to implement.
For optimum performance, your storage admins should have everything they need to manage and monitor their fleet from any location and any device – at their fingertips.
Data Services Cloud Console provides 100% cloud-managed infrastructure, meaning your IT admin can control and monitor storage from anywhere, on any device. The cloud-native control plane scales automatically with infrastructure, so managing hundreds of systems across geographies is as simple as managing one. It manages infrastructure through an SaaS-based console, accessible from anywhere and on any device, that abstracts data and infrastructure from the physical infrastructure to eliminate silos and complexity.
This is especially important in our new way of working, due to the rapid adjustments that needed to be implemented as a result of the global pandemic. Now, IT admins can access all systems from wherever they are working – from their home office, the datacenter, or even the local coffee shop. We’re giving businesses the flexibility and peace of mind they need that their systems can always be monitored, no matter where the admins are located.
Gone are the days when one had to sacrifice the simplicity, self-service, automation, and manage-from-anywhere capabilities of the cloud for the resiliency, long-term cost management, and data sovereignty of on-prem. For the first time ever, HPE Alletra powered with Data Services Cloud Console and HPE GreenLake are bringing data innovators, data managers, and IT administrators the cloud operational agility they desire – right in their own data center. Our world is changing, and it’s time for the infrastructure that supports your business to pivot.
It’s time to bring the cloud experience to your applications and workloads, wherever your data lives.
Want to learn more? Please check out these resources:
Videos:
HPE Alletra - Power your data from Edge to Cloud - Meet the Experts session
Data Services Cloud Console from HPE
Introducing Data Services Cloud Console | Chalk Talk
Blogs:
It’s time for a new data vision — and a new architecture
Huge news! Welcome to the age of Unified DataOps
Accelerate faster with Unified Data Operations as-a-service
Introducing HPE Alletra: Flipping the switch to the cloud experience
Join us for an in-depth look at Unified DataOps, the exciting new vision for data management and infrastructure from HPE that accelerates digital transformation — edge to cloud.
UNLEASH THE POWER OF YOUR DATA — WITH UNIFIED DATAOPS FROM HPE
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
9am PT | 10am MT | 11am CT | Noon ET
Duration: 30 Minutes
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StorageExperts
Our team of Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage experts helps you to dive deep into relevant infrastructure topics.
