Understanding Enterprise Storage – a dark art or new era of simplicity? Part 2

Continuing from part 1 and building on leveraging intelligence and automation - what should we look at? considering that hardware is increasingly fast from most players ? Even the latest Gartner report on All Flash storage doesn't help differentiate, most vendors are leaders and visionaries , the view from many analysts. I would therefore believe that we now need to look beyond the box (hardware) and focus on business needs. Your business, much like your daily life with your smartphone, is driven by applications and automation rather than IT infrastructure, what you need is a solution built with intelligence in its DNA in your storage environment to deliver a similar experience .

Let me simplify this.

Wouldn't it be great to have storage that looks after itself, is always available,always fast,and can automate the day to day tasks usually associated with enterprise storage management add to that it ensures your data sits in the right place at the right time; when you need to access it, to make agile business decisions.

Business needs intelligent storage to automate tasks and to dynamically change its behavior based on usage patterns as opposed to more administrators to manage tasks. In short, you should make technology decisions by defining your business, based on workloads in other words what your application is doing, much like apps on our smartphones. Your banking needs to be there all the time, however other apps such as your favorite shopping app, are convenient but not crucial enough to have to be available every minute of every day. You certainly should not need to focus on issues like Set sizes, IOPS or RAID. In fact, none of these technical details ,that interest people like me, should be any concern for business.

You should simply define your business needs into two distinct camps:

Mission critical or Intelligent Tier 0...

Think of this as mission critical storage without compromising simplicity and features. This would be defined as your key applications such as billing or core banking, where availability and blazing performance are of utmost importance.

General purpose or Intelligent Tier 1....

This could be defined as the highest level of simplicity and value for your dollar and can be used for virtual machine farms or collaboration tools, like SharePoint that is still important but maybe slightly less critical.

Add to this, you certainly should not have to forklift your systems to benefit from the latest technologies. In other words, all upgrades to next-generation tech should be achieved with no data migration .Software upgrades should be simple or automated, and achieved with the simplicity you expect from your smart phone. You highlight the ones you want, click upgrade (or even automated if your security allows) and you’re done. 

In other words, Once you have defined the importance of your application into either mission critical or general purpose, you can make you storage platform decision.

Let's be honest with all the advances in technology and automation, it shouldn't be complex to choose the right system for your business.

So my advice is to look to storage offerings with the best intelligence available, both built-in and cross platform aware, to make life easier, and get a good nights sleep, because this is where your organizations lifeblood "its data" will live ......

Intelligence changes everything!