How to evaluate modern enterprise storage

[StorageExperts]

Businesses looking to become more data-driven have multiple requirements and face many IT infrastructure choices. Understanding the three flavors of modern data storage can help you narrow down your options.  

The past decade has brought so much evolution in IT, it’s hard to remember a time when storage innovation focused on modest increases in speed and resiliency. The first meaningful change came a decade ago, when flash media replaced spinning disks, delivering a quantum leap forward in storage performance. That innovation was followed by the cloud era, which unlocked new levels of agility, and brought on-demand service delivery to the forefront.

Fast forward to today and we’ve advanced squarely into the era of intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) now make a self-managing, self-healing, self-optimizing storage experience possible. Successful enterprises are taking full advantage of intelligence and other innovations in next-generation storage architectures to drive digital transformation.

Of course, businesses looking to take advantage of these innovations have multiple requirements, and there are many choices you face in selecting a solution. So many, in fact, you might need help in the selection process. For example, it’s important to have a strategy for the overall infrastructure. Selecting point products that don’t communicate with each other can very quickly box you in as your business evolves. You’ll also need to consider your application mix, as well as the lifecycle of the data involved. 

To help you narrow down your options, consider the type of storage that best suits your business. When it comes to enterprise storage, there are basically three categories to choose from.

The 3 flavors of modern enterprise storage

The three categories of modern enterprise storage that most organizations turn to today each come with specific strengths and use cases.

1.      Mission-critical storage

It goes without saying, mission-critical applications have to be always-on and always-fast – because any loss of access to data translates directly into lost time and money. The advent of automation has changed the thinking around storage control in mission-critical environments, and has immensely improved availability.

Take healthcare systems, for example. Medical centers deliver healthcare 24x7x365, so they need storage solutions that can ensure uptime for their applications. Uptime is a core tenet of HPE Primera storage, with built-in AI to ensure apps and data stay online. HPE InfoSight, the industry’s most advanced artificial intelligence for infrastructure, fine tunes storage systems in real time, predicting and preventing potential issues from bringing the system down.

Designed and built for 100% availability, HPE Primera helps medical facilities provide fast and easy access to critical applications – even when their staff is off site. Recently, the highly secure infrastructure helped the Erasmus Medical Center laboratory carry out COVID-19 tests and critical antibody research with 5,000 staff working remotely under the country’s COVID-19 guidelines.

HPE enterprise storage systems can actually prevent downtime, too. HPE InfoSight watches over your infrastructure 24/7, looking out for potential issues. IT administrators don’t even have to call HPE Support 90% of the time, because the built-in AI has already predicted and addressed an issue before you were even aware it existed.

2.      General purpose storage

General purpose storage is an ideal solution for cost-constrained organizations. It delivers the best price for performance, while maintaining many of the advantages of on-premises, mission-critical storage. Here, too, HPE InfoSight intelligence plays a key role, optimizing the system and staying ahead of potential infrastructure problems through predictive analytics.

Businesses experiencing fast-paced growth can rapidly outgrow their infrastructure. That might sound like a good problem to have – but I often hear about IT organizations spending so much time just trying to keep the lights on, they barely have the bandwidth to address that growth. A little modernization can go a long way to help these businesses. For example, HPE Nimble Storage can reduce storage management time from 20-30 hours a week down to just 10-15 minutes, giving IT teams an enormous amount of time back to focus on innovation. That improvement can be largely credited to HPE InfoSight and the self-managing features it enables.

3.      Cloud storage

The cloud experience has given developers and IT operations the ability to quickly scale new apps and capabilities. It has also served as a catalyst for new business models, new experiences, and new efficiencies in every industry. It’s not surprising that cloud storage is growing enormously. Cloud storage is easy to manage, it can be deployed in minutes – or even seconds – and it can expand to infinite scale.

This kind of agility and flexibility are particularly valuable to organizations with multiple sites and limited onsite IT resources. School districts, for example, are continually challenged to support new educational initiatives on a limited budget, which means their data storage must be extremely simple – and extremely capable. If the school system happens to be in a hurricane zone, they also need rock solid data protection and simple disaster recovery features. HPE Nimble Storage is an open, resilient, flexible solution that can be perfect in these multi-site environments. Fully integrated with HPE Cloud Volumes, the solution lets you back up all your data to secure, enterprise-grade cloud storage for near-instant access.

For a real-world example, see how HPE Nimble Storage flash arrays with HPE Cloud Volumes provide Carteret County public school system with high-performance storage and off-site data protection all in one easy-to-manage solution.  

A guide to enterprise storage that fits your business

Modern storage solutions are a critical part of the data center in the era of intelligence. If your business, like so many others, is transforming to a data-driven enterprise, you’ll need to find flexible, scalable storage solutions that can keep data secure and highly available. Today’s most advanced solutions easily satisfy even the most demanding infrastructure requirements.

A new Enterprise Storage Buyers Guide explores the options and helps you evaluate storage vendors. The guide provides details about the three categories of enterprise storage, and includes key questions to ask about AI, data mobility, and cloud-readiness. And it explains how modern storage helps you transform to an always-on enterprise and get more time back in the day to focus on innovation

Download the HPE Enterprise Storage Buyer’s Guide .

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• Enterprise storage agility: 3 keys for success via HPE's Enterprise.nxt

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Matt Morrissey has been in the storage industry for over 20 years and has worked for HPE for the last 10. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager, he is passionate about showing the world how HPE Primera is redefining mission critical storage.

Connect with Matt on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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