A solution to the storage provisioning conundrum: HPE GreenLake for storage

[katedavis]

Calibrating storage capacity, whether it’s for new projects or for general business requirements, is a notoriously tricky thing. I was reminded of just how challenging it is after seeing some stats in a recent Futurum Research paper. Around two-thirds (67%) of the companies in a Futurum poll¹ said they over-invest to avoid running out of capacity. No huge surprise there, perhaps. Lots of businesses take this cautious (and economically sub-optimal) approach rather than see important projects stall out because of storage bottlenecks. But here’s what really caught my eye … even with this widespread strategy of overprovisioning, many companies still find themselves experiencing shortfalls!

Fully one-third of the respondents in Futurum’s sample say they’ve experienced running out of storage capacity or hitting utilization rates high enough to impact performance. And the results can be costly. Among organizations that experienced performance issues, over one-third (36%) said the disruption ended up costing them more than $100,000.

“When considering on-premises storage, predicting how much capacity may be required six months to a year or two in the future is an almost impossible task,” the paper notes. “Balancing the high cost of procuring too much capacity upfront with the business impact of running out of capacity is a constant challenge.”

There’s an answer to this conundrum: HPE GreenLake for storage – a consumption-based storage service that puts storage capacity at your fingertips. We set up a buffer of workload-optimized storage capacity sized to your business, and we meter your usage. There are no up-front costs and you pay only for the capacity you use above your reserve capacity. We deliver pre-integrated storage solutions to your edge location, colocation facility, or data center in as little as 14 days. And we maintain and manage the solution for you, freeing up your team for important projects. HPE GreenLake brings the cloud experience to you on-prem; at a stroke, it removes both the inefficiencies of over-provisioning and the risks around under-provisioning.

We offer three cloud services within HPE GreenLake for primary storage workloads. If you click on the link for each of the offerings below, you can click through from there to get pricing info.

Mission Critical Storage. An all-flash solution designed for workloads with high performance requirements and extreme latency sensitivity, such as large-scale databases, ERP systems and transaction processing. This service provides extreme resiliency and 100% availability for essential workloads. It’s available in three configurations – Performance, Balanced, or Cost-Optimized – to fit your business needs.

Business Critical Storage. Designed for your medium-scale databases, mixed workloads, and virtual machine farms, this all-flash solution offers 6-9s of measured availability for your Tier-1 applications. It’s available in Performance or Balanced configs.

General Purpose Storage. This is the one to choose for workloads that don’t need an all-flash solution, but can benefit from a flash-enhanced architecture – for example, general applications, mixed workloads, disaster recovery, and backup data for dev/test. Available in three configurations.

And to protect your data with ease, we also offer cloud services with HPE GreenLake for data protection. These services provide modernized backup and recovery delivered with the agility of cloud.

You don’t have to take my word on HPE GreenLake being a great solution. Here’s an excellent example of a company that leveraged HPE all-flash storage technology together with HPE GreenLake’s consumption model. Toyota Mapmaster builds advanced map databases used in car navigation and road traffic systems, so you can imagine the volume of high-precision data they’re working with. The HPE solution reduced batch-load processing time from five hours to one hour, and cut the time needed for daily database replication to one-third; HPE GreenLake enabled the company to bypass upfront costs for the infrastructure and simplify accounting with one monthly bill.

As I mentioned, HPE manages these solutions for you, taking that weight off your shoulders. But if you’re looking for a complete turnkey approach, one that can cover your entire IT environment if that’s what you need, you should check out HPE GreenLake Management Services. Remote management of the IT infrastructure is an increasingly attractive option for many companies in the current environment. See this IDC report, The Business Value of HPE GreenLake Management Services for an overview of the benefits.

And, to help you learn more about HPE GreenLake, here’s a great resource: We’ve collected all of the on-demand video sessions from HPE Discover Virtual Experience at this page: HPE GreenLake: The Cloud that Comes to You. I’d especially recommend watching the session by Keith White, our SVP and GM for GreenLake Cloud Services – here’s a direct link: Bring the Cloud Experience to All Your Apps and Data, Now.

1. Futurum Research paper, 2019: The power of consumption-based on-premises services in meeting dynamic storage demands