Logicalis eBook: Virtualization 2.0 – The next era in enterprise computing

Specialist

Converged Infrastructure

In the old days, when you had a failure in the data center, you’d run into the server room and look for the red blinking lights. They told you, “Stop, pay attention – something’s wrong. Don’t miss it.” It’s kind of hard to see those red blinking lights in a virtual environment, but that doesn’t make their message any less important.

The intense amount of data and communication flowing into and through your data center today requires an entirely new way of thinking. We can’t just repackage older technologies; we need new solutions that embrace the future of IT and simplify deployment as a service. That’s why these are such exciting times. New technologies are springing to life, and the big picture is coming into view for the first time in years, decades even.

The main obstacle to making fundamental changes – even in a stair-stepped manner – is usually money.

Budgets are not increasing in step with corporate users’ demands for bigger, better, faster IT services, leaving CIOs with some incredibly tough decisions to make. Ironically, though, the way to save money in the long run may be to spend some of it today. Developing a roadmap and following it in steps and stages, experts say, will be easier, less costly and less painful than performing a wholesale replacement of your data center when it can no longer keep up down the road.

Read All About ItThis series of four articles is intended to give you a glimpse of what’s coming, what it can mean to your company’s technological future and why it’s so important to define your IT roadmap and start taking strides along that path now.

�� “Building a Roadmap: Are You Private Cloud Ready?” examines the journey you must make along the road to private cloud computing and the questions to ask to help you get started.

�� “Starting the Journey: Why Does Where Apps Reside Matter?” takes a look at where applications live in your IT environment and how those critical decisions will impact your infrastructure both in and outside of the cloud.

�� “Software-Defined Data Centers: Put an End to Your BYOD Nightmares” explores the way we communicate today, the impact of BYOD on the data center and how the emergence of “software-defined” everything is ushering in a new age of responsiveness to enterprise users’ computing demands and a new period of manageability for IT.

�� “A New Era in IT: Why CIOs Should Embrace Storage Innovation Today” weighs the balancing act between the trends in innovative storage solutions, the very real productivity gains made possible by implementing them and the budgetary constraints that are holding you back.

The intense amount of data and communication flowing into and through your data center today requires an entirely new way of thinking. The question is, what will you do about it?

The lights in your

data center are

blinking, delivering

a clear message:

“Stop, look and

pay attention – your

IT strategy is at a

crossroads and it’s

time to act.” The

question is, what

will you do about it?

Ready for the Future? It’s All in the Planning

If you’ve ever left an IT meeting shaking your head and wondering how you’re going to implement your C-suite’s “do more with less” plan, you’re not alone. But if you’re not considering private cloud as a possible solution to your conundrum, you’re as alone as if you were on a deserted island. According to research firm Forrester1, nearly half of all North American and European enterprises will set aside budget for private cloud investments this year.

But why private cloud? “After virtualization, private cloud is the next logical step in the journey toward cloud computing,” says Brandon Harris, vice president, HP Solutions, for Logicalis. “And it’s a step in the right direction.”

“Private cloud is the next logical step in the journey toward cloud computing. And it’s a step in the right direction.”

In fact, aligning your virtualization and private cloud strategies may be the single most important step you take in IT this year. “Private cloud is becoming a hot trend because, essentially, it’s the intersection of two other hot trends – virtualization and cloud computing,” says Gartner Vice President Tom Bittman2.

Server consolidation and virtualization are strategic tools that can help lower costs and improve agility in the data center. But virtualization and private cloud are not interchangeable ideas. Technologies that provide for scalability, rapid provisioning, automation, orchestration, charge-back and service catalog development have given IT pros the ability to expand their use of virtualization by implementing a private cloud.

A private cloud extends virtualization to storage and networks, which are then managed with tools that treat these servers, storage and networks as a single pool of resources. Your private cloud resides within your own data center, leveraging the equipment you have and your existing skills, assets and virtualization investments.

Automation and orchestration tools are the key to moving from a virtualized infrastructure to a true private cloud. And this infrastructure transformation – this convergence of ideas – enables you to build a cloud computing roadmap today that will take you to tomorrow and beyond.

While settling on the right cloud roadmap is a process, if you want to remain agile and competitive, it is clearly not something to delay.

Eighty percent of large North American companies surveyed by global management consulting firm McKinsey3 say they are moving forward with plans to host critical applications in the cloud and, in large part, that means building their own private cloud environments.

According to the McKinsey study, some respondents are planning to host up to 75 percent of their companies’ applications in the cloud, and they expect savings of up to 40 percent compared with their existing infrastructure as a result. The question is, are you ready to join them?

Whether to adopt a private cloud strategy really isn’t the right question anymore. What savvy CIOs are looking for today is a roadmap with clear directions for how to get there. What makes those directions clear is companies’ ability to examine their own resources and business needs, and their desire to ask three critical questions about their applications, management plans and growth.

Logicalis Cloud Centers of Excellence - Bringing Private Cloud to LifeIs a private cloud right for you? Come see one in action and find out. International IT solutions and managed services firm Logicalis has created two Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoE), one in Farmington Hills, Mich., and the other in Irvine, Calif.

These CCoE demo facilities allow Logicalis to display all the components of a cloud – from servers to storage, networking, software, services and security. Here, IT pros can see a total cloud solution working in a unified and seamless way.

The differences between private clouds, virtualization and converged infrastructures are often difficult for customers to envision through discussions alone, but by actually seeing the consoles, “the cloud” is transformed into a logical set of hardware and software tools working together.

Just seeing the physical hardware in the demo center demonstrates that the cloud, while revolutionary, is built on mature platforms, not something risky and unknown. In fact, visitors may even find they have some of the very same components –blades, storage products, etc.– already in their data centers.

1Forrester: http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/12-12-03-2013_cloud_predictions_well_finally_get_real_about_cloud2Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/cloud-computing/private-cloud.jsp 3McKinsey: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Protecting_information_in_the_cloud_3041

Building a Roadmap: Are You Private Cloud Ready?

Schedule a private cloud demo – live or via the Web – in either of Logicalis’ Cloud Centers of Excellence.

Private Cloud Computing: Where Buzzwords Meet Business.

1. Are your applications ready to live in a cloud environment?A critical component in the success of any private cloud is determining whether the applications you’re planning to run in the cloud are actually cloud-ready. While some applications are designed from the ground up specifically for use in the cloud, others require some re-tooling before being deployed. Often, you’ll need an expert to help you identify which applications are cloud-ready and which are not.

“Before moving applications to the cloud, it’s crucial to determine which applications have been prepared by their developers for cloud environments, which ones cannot be rewritten to live in a cloud and will have to stay in a traditional data center environment, and which ones can thrive in the cloud if they are re-written,” says Brandon Harris, vice president, HP Solutions, for Logicalis. “At Logicalis, for example, we have an application development practice that uses best practices and cloud-enabling technologies like VMware SpringSource to rewrite apps for private cloud environments, whether that environment is based on a VMware software stack, an HP software stack or an open standards software stack.”

2. How are you going to manage your private cloud?By nature, all cloud software stacks have a management component to them, but it’s important to ultimately manage the cloud environment as you move each new application into place. Are you going to bill back usage of a certain application to specific business units inside the organization? If so, you’ll need a specific toolset to monitor what IT resources that department is using. And you’ll need another robust toolset to manage adds and changes to applications in your private cloud. To take advantage

of the converged infrastructure you’ve built, you have to know just what resources you have at your disposal that can be leveraged to deploy new applications as you add them.

“It’s not like you just build a cloud and say, ‘I’m ready to go.’ You have to have a long-term strategy before you even begin.”

3. How are you going to grow as your IT needs change?Businesses are never static, so you have to plan for change as you design your cloud strategy. Shifting from a virtualized, converged infrastructure to a premises-based private cloud may be a natural next step along the path, but what happens after that? Are you going to continue to build out that cloud environment in your data center? Are you going to want to burst to an outside data center to cover peaks? Or are you going to move into a hybrid cloud strategy, shifting a portion of your workload onto a public cloud? You have to consider the pros and cons of applications that are readily available for consumption in the cloud today like the popular Salesforce CRM software and compare and contrast their use to your own home-grown or specially developed applications residing in your on- or off-premise data center today. “It’s not like you just build a cloud and say, ‘I’m ready to go,’” Harris says. “You have to have a long-term strategy before you even begin.”

Interested in learning more about creating Your Private Cloud Your Way? Visit Logicalis’ private cloud Web site at www.us.logicalis.com/privatecloud.

Private Cloud ResourcesRead a Logicalis eBook, “A Cloud of Your Own”www.us.logicalis.com/cloudebook

What if your data center could do everything you dreamed?www.us.logicalis.com/hpci

Download an eBook, “Elements of Design: How the Data Center of Today Can Be the Data Center for Tomorrow”www.us.logicalis.com/hpdcebook

Get ready for converged cloud computingwww.us.logicalis.com/hpcc

Check out this private cloud IT readiness checklistwww.us.logicalis.com/pcreadiness

Three Questions to Ask Before Charting Your Course in Private Cloud Computing

Traditional data center? In the cloud? Where you choose to host your applications tomorrow may be the most critical IT decision you make today. It influences your infrastructure choices and your cloud strategy and impacts the alignment of your IT capabilities with your business needs. If you’ve failed to conduct a thorough assessment of your applications and where they should reside, your IT strategy just won’t work the way you envisioned.

“You have to look at the complete application stack, where it’s sitting today, and determine where it should sit two or three years from now,” says Brandon Harris, vice president, HP Solutions, for Logicalis.

It’s true, moving applications to the cloud can result in significant improvements in resource utilization, scalability, functionality, development/testing efficiency and maintenance costs. However, changes may have to be made to your applications to leverage the cloud’s features to the fullest.

Some applications like email and CRM are tailor-made for a public cloud. Others need re-tooling to work in public or private cloud environments. And still others are just not prospects for the cloud and are best maintained in a traditional data center.

“The technology is changing so fast, you have to have a good roadmap. If you don’t do anything now, instead of being able to do a migration with a step-by-step approach to get there over time, you might be looking at a wholesale replacement down the road; that’s much harder than starting the journey early and following the roadmap,” Harris explains.

Evaluating each of your business-critical applications means taking stock of the operating system they are

built to run on, your ability to support and maintain them in-house long term, the disaster recovery requirements for those application ecosystems, an examination of your existing infrastructure and its ability to host these applications as your business grows and any possible advantages you might gain from moving select apps to a cloud – public or private. From an application standpoint, this often involves rethinking how a particular application is built. Moving an application to the cloud without re-architecting the application may not allow you to capture all the benefits the cloud has to offer.

“Moving an app to the cloud as-is is like using a sleeping bag on a brand-new king-sized bed.”

The cloud gives an application space to stretch out, unprecedented monitoring to be comfortable and as many services as it needs to be warm,” says Brian Day, director of application services and PaaS strategy for Logicalis. “But you have to look at the entire application ecosystem as well as your own end users to reap the rewards. It’s possible to run parts of the ecosystem in the public cloud and others in the private cloud, but understanding where to split applications to minimize latency across the network is a precise science that can have a dramatic impact on performance. Equally important is the manner in which the end user accesses the application.”

If an application might benefit from residing in a public or private cloud, the retro-fitting of that application should be done by a cloud and application-savvy solution provider, a combination that’s not always easy to find, but is critical to getting the most out of moving your apps to the cloud.

Moving Forward: First Steps to Consider

Choose infrastructure partners with R&D experience.

If you’re considering a technology refresh or data center overhaul, look for vendor partners that have a history of working with major ISVs to ensure the kinds of applications you use most will perform on that vendor’s hardware platforms.

Partner with solution providers who have a history in application development and cloud.

It’s rare to find a solution provider that is a cloud expert and has a history in application development, but the two skills really are a package deal. If you’re considering moving applications to the cloud, and if those apps may need re-tooling to work in a cloud environment, selecting a partner with deep skill sets in both areas may be the best decision you ever made.

Ask yourself where your applica-tions should live three years from now and start the journey today.

The longer you wait to begin migrating your applications to their future home, the harder it will become as infrastructure ages and maintenance costs rise. Create a solid IT roadmap now and follow it into the future.

Starting the Journey: Why Does Where Apps Reside Matter?Critical Decisions: How Applications Influence IT Strategy.

BACKFORWARD

1. Learn to Share: Developing for the cloud is different from developing for in-house hardware. Rather than requiring applications have their own database, storage, communication and authentication mechanisms, the cloud can offer common, shared components accessible via an API. These common components can then be built in a scalable, modular, secure way so that the developer doesn’t have to worry about scaling or backing up a database. The advantage? By leveraging common services, developers can build more scalable applications in less time, allowing the developer to focus more on the business’s needs than on the application’s requirements.

2. Don’t Bypass PaaS: The end game of shared services is to provide a suite of services that are easily accessible and a system for managing environments, users and the deployment of code. Developers and testers can easily deploy and promote tested code using the auto deployment features inherent in most platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. This offers additional advantages such as the ability to snap a new functionality into an existing application; for example, if there’s a common API on the shared platform for sending out robotic calls, the client could add that functionality to their order entry system, having the system call customers to tell them their orders are ready. In a PaaS environment, time to add new functionality can be significantly reduced.

3. Become Omniscient: Within the cloud, enhanced monitoring tools and dashboards give developers the ability to predict utilization and right-size resources on the fly to meet the needs of the user base much more easily – and

cost effectively – than they can in a physical infrastructure. This allows the developer to size cloud applications to more nominal resource levels rather than overdesigning the initial infrastructure because, through the enhanced monitoring tools the cloud offers, additional instances of the application can be spun up or down as needed. It also gives IT pros the ability to debug issues quickly and much more easily than in a physical infrastructure.

4. Give Orchestration a Second Look: Clouds can contain an orchestration layer that enables rapid provisioning of whole environments (VMs, software, configuration). Many clients believe that because an application is difficult to set up, it is not a candidate for automatic self-provisioning, but that is exactly when it makes the most sense. Orchestration can automate standard processes, such as deploying an entire testing environment; thus, orchestration, together with a self-provisioning portal and monitoring capability, can be an extremely powerful tool.

5. Rely on Self-Service: Most clouds have some aspect of self-provisioning of at least VMs and, in the case of orchestration, entire environments. This means developers and quality assurance (QA) teams can have access to applications when and where they need to. Having an orchestration layer to give them a measure of controlled self-service and a stable testing environment leads to increased efficiencies in development, testing and deployment of applications in the cloud.

Five Tips for Getting the Most Out of Moving Your Apps to the Cloud

Interested in learning more about moving applications to the cloud from the experts?

View our 30-minute online cloud discussion! It’s free to watch, but the tips you’ll learn are invaluable. Visit www.DCFast5.com today!

Learn about public cloud-based software-as-a-servicewww.us.logicalis.com/saas

Find out about Logicalis’ data center strategic assessmentwww.us.logicalis.com/dcassessment

Read about Logicalis’ hosted Exchange servicewww.us.logicalis.com/hostedemail

Explore Logicalis’ extensive solutions and serviceswww.us.logicalis.com/solutions

ApplicationResources

We’re on the cusp of a new era in the data center, and it’s primed for fast growth. There’s no denying the radical shifts in the way we communicate today. We’ve moved from communications networks built to support a series of desktops with, maybe, a few laptops hard-wired in, to the consumerization of corporate data centers ushered in by the BYOD era. Instead of a handful of hard-wired laptops tapping into a company’s internal infrastructure, today’s IT departments have to contend with a vast sea of computing and mobile devices from laptops to tablets to smartphones.

All of that changes the way your data center needs to look, act and perform. As BYOD evolves, huge numbers of devices are instantly being added to the corporate IT environment, so it’s crucial to make it easier to manage the data center in order to deploy and serve the users who need these devices to communicate.

“We’re living in a day and age when it’s all about user experience.”

The experience of that user when connecting through your corporate IT environment, Harris notes, is defined by your data center’s performance. If it fails to perform to today’s fundamental BYOD expectations, you’re alienating your constituents.

The question is, what to do? Brandon Harris, vice president, HP Solutions, Logicalis recommends that you examine the varied models of BYOD communication entering your workplace, re-examine the ways your company uses the cloud today and define how it will use it tomorrow and then examine the framework of your data center to determine what it needs to do to meet those demands today and into the future. Do you need to redesign the data center? Or maybe flatten the network with fewer layers so traffic can move faster? Now is the time to decide.

Data centers as a whole are headed in the same direction that servers and storage recently went. Today, you probably have a virtualized environment with access to cloud technologies that make it possible for you to deploy new resources in a matter of minutes, hours or maybe a day’s time at the most. But you probably still need a couple of weeks to prime your data center for the addition of a new application. In this age of rapid deployment, BYOD and instantaneous communication and collaboration, weeks just won’t do.

If you can separate the management of your data center from the actual devices residing in it so that the management is living above the devices, you can better control your entire data center from that single location.

That’s the premise behind the software-defined data center, and it’s where the industry is headed as a whole. And, analysts say, the industry is heading there fast: According to IDC, worldwide software-defined networking within the data center is poised to grow from a $360 million market in 2013 to $3.7 billion by 2016. That’s because, according to Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC, “Logic and policies that can be defined, changed, and modified result in a more dynamic network, providing the scale network administrators so desperately crave.”1

In a software-defined data center, you’ll be able to sharpen your wireless strategy, managing your infrastructure in a way that is optimized for the kinds of communications tools your users and customers are bringing into your company today and tomorrow. “As the software-defined data center matures,” Harris says, “choosing your vendor partners wisely will be critical; be sure that the devices you buy today are enabled for the software-defined environment you will be running tomorrow.”

Software-Defined Data Centers: Put an End to Your BYOD Nightmares

There are 1.2 billion smartphones poised to enter the market over the next five years. Is your network ready?

Prepare Your Data Center. Now is the time to assess, and potentially upgrade, your business’s wireless infrastructure; be sure it can support the additional bandwidth requirements of employee-owned mobile devices and includes adequate Quality of Service (QoS) controls for appropriate handling of critical traffic.

Monitor and Manage Activity. Implement a mobile device management (MDM) strategy that can provide complete provisioning, configuration, monitoring and reporting for connecting BYOD mobile devices.

Make Your Infrastructure BYOD-Friendly. Incorporate and integrate BYOD tools now. This includes building a robust IT platform capable of delivering real-time collaboration experiences to any device and providing transparent mobility with location services for anytime, anywhere communications.

Data Center Scalability: New Ideas Are Shaping the Future of IT.

A Changing IT Landscape:Top Tips for Managing BYOD

1IDC: http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20121219005104/en/software-defined-network/SDN/network-protocol

Six Tips to Help You Define Where You Stand Along Tomorrow’s Data Center Continuum1. Quality of Service: Ask yourself if you’re ready to deliver the kind of quality of service that your users already expect. As BYOD matures, tomorrow’s workforce will demand anytime, anyplace connectivity with uninterrupted access to applications and data. The new standard is 100 percent reliability. If you’re not sure your infrastructure can deliver on that expectation, then it’s critical to bring in partners now that can provide the necessary products, solutions and services to help you get ready.

2. Security: Tomorrow’s workplace will open the gates to an array of new security challenges. Outsiders will bring wireless devices into your company, and inside users will take IT outside the company’s domain. It’s important for you to choose technology partners that can deliver the tools and expertise you need to secure your data center equally well from the inside out and the outside in.

3. Speed: Business IT departments need to handle ever higher resolutions, volumes and user expectations – and the demand will only grow for these capabilities. Only through careful planning can you be confident your data center is highly capable, reliable and faster than most.

4. Wireless Access: Work is no longer a place; it’s an activity. Wherever businesspeople go, they expect their workplace to go with them. Fast, reliable wireless access isn’t a bonus; it’s a commercial necessity. And it’s becoming IT’s job to make sure the company’s businesspeople are constantly connected – with or without wires.

5. Multi-Device: Tomorrow’s workforce will continue to communicate and collaborate with an ever-changing array of devices. You can’t possibly know every device people will choose to use in the workplace, yet the ability to allow people to “bring your own device” is a must. As a result, it is the responsibility of the IT department to ensure the infrastructure is ready to support those users when, where and how they want to work.

6. Consistent Experience Worldwide: People expect to have consistent tools, technologies and standards of service. For IT, that means building and supporting a unified global infrastructure so your company’s users can communicate in various ways on a multitude of devices wherever they are in the world.

BYOD and Data Center ResourcesLearn more about BYOD trends in an Ovum study commissioned by Logicalis www.us.logicalis.com/ovum

View a graphical representation of the BYOD market researchwww.us.logicalis.com/byodinfographic

Read a Logicalis feature story, “Next-Generation Data Center”www.us.logicalis.com/dcnextgen

Is your data center ready to meet the demands of tomorrow’s workplace?

� Does your data center have a current and future-proof network switching environment in place? � Do you have well-defined, best-practice Quality of Service (QOS) processes and procedures in use? � Is your existing IT security robust, and have you implemented security policies that will take you into the future? � How effectively do you manage individual devices now, and will what you are doing today to meet your company’s needs tomorrow? �What applications will you need to add to your IT framework? � Have you clearly defined your organization’s cloud roadmap, and have you started to implement those plans? �What emerging technologies and challenges do you need to plan for?

Take Our Quiz

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You’re at a fork in the road. You’ve got issues with how your company is storing, accessing and mining its data, but your budget hasn’t grown in step in with your users’ IT expectations. Will maintaining the status quo be more costly than pursuing new storage innovations?

According to a recent study by IT research, analysis and strategy firm Enterprise Strategy Group, IT pros’ top storage environment challenges include the rapid growth and management of unstructured data, the cost of hardware and concerns about data protection. But it’s not just a data explosion that has CIOs and their staffs worried; it’s their corporate users’ growing expectations.

For the past two decades, the CIO’s job has centered on managing specific applications and systems. But the nature of IT is changing, and experts say adopting new storage innovations will be critical to your ability to deliver IT services, to mine more value from the information at your disposal and to reduce your risk exposure.

One of those new storage innovations is the increasing interest in the move toward a software-defined data center, certainly an issue that didn’t exist two decades ago when most of today’s storage was originally conceived.

Important trends ranging from mobility and social media to cloud, “big data” and the evolution of the software-defined data center are all affecting legacy storage architectures and creating a major shift in the storage industry today. Now, more than ever, there is a particular focus on defining “return on investment” as a reduction in complexity, the consolidation of workloads on less equipment and the discovery of hidden value inside your existing data sets.

But there’s something even more important: the ability to deliver storage solutions that scale from entry-level to high-end, sharing common data services across both physical storage systems and software-defined storage.

“It’s an entirely new mindset, a new way of thinking about and delivering storage solutions that CIOs must embrace today,” says Bob Hankins, vice president of Storage for Logicalis. “This new storage paradigm solves IT pros’ most demanding storage problems.”

Today, most enterprises realize only about 43 percent of technology’s business potential, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, Inc.’s Executive Programs. But Mark McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, says that’s not enough for IT to remain relevant: “IT needs new tools if it hopes to hunt for technology-intensive innovation and harvest raised business performance from transformed IT infrastructure, operations and applications. Without change, CIOs and IT consign themselves to tending a garden of legacy assets and responsibilities.”1

It’s the ability of your primary storage to support all applications and data types across physical, virtual and cloud resources. It’s the ability to create an environment for information retention and analytics that can archive and search within massive “big data” content repositories, finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack” with unprecedented speed and ease. And it’s the ability to protect your information and create a data storage and backup environment that is both efficient and high speed.2 This kind of “storage without boundaries” exists today. The question is, are you ready to embrace it?

A New Era in IT: Why CIOs Should Embrace Storage Innovation Today

Software-Defined Storage – What Can It Do for You?Reduce costs.Servers and hypervisors are more capable today, creating an opportunity to embed storage functionality as a virtual machine. This enables IT organizations to create open, federated pools of capacity, complete with rich data services, that operate on heterogeneous servers and span multiple hypervisors. Significant savings come from the reduction in physical infrastructure and by leveraging an industry-standard server architecture.

Reduce management time. Software-defined storage is the creation of a new, more easily accessible home for the management and control of virtualized storage resources.

Reduce complexity.In today’s data centers, storage services originate with the software inside each individual storage component, but with software-defined storage, that will change to an infrastructure where the system, storage and network services are delivered by software that spans the data center as a whole, dramatically reducing the software within each component.

A Quiet Crisis: Balancing the Need for Storage Innovation with a Budget That Just Won’t Budge.

1Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2304615 2HP: http://www2.ibtalk.net/index.php?cmp=mtx_pre_registration&PHPSESSID=4bb97a0be86852cc6e75e97c10bcb5d3

Take a good hard look at your storage infrastructure. Established designs for legacy storage systems date back to the days of the mainframe 20 years ago. They just weren’t built with today’s uses in mind, and that means there are systemic gaps that leave your company exposed to the pressures placed upon the systems by unpredictable workloads and unrestrained data growth.

Storage has to move in the same direction as the rest of your IT environment. Converged, virtualized storage will soon lead to software-defined storage solutions. Just as you’ve had to create a roadmap to the cloud, experts agree, you need to start the journey toward an evolved, polymorphic storage environment today as well.

1. Seamless delivery of IT.CIOs are looking for storage solutions that will help them deliver their IT services in a more timely, cost-effective manner. This means establishing primary storage options that support all applications and data types across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

2. More value from information.Big data is the big buzzword in storage communities today, and IT pros are taking that to heart. They want storage solutions for information retention and analytics that will give them the ability to archive the exploding amounts of data they need to store and to search through massive big data content repositories in seconds rather than the hours or days it has taken in the past to perform similar functions.

3. Reduction in risk exposure. IT experts are becoming increasingly more risk averse, so they’re looking for information protection through disk-based storage with deduplication for efficient and high-speed backup and recovery processes. IT experts want increased speed so they can perform backup and recovery functions at two to three times that of previous storage generations, achievable through software-defined storage mechanisms that separate management and traffic functions.

Source: HP: http://www2.ibtalk.net/presentation/webinar/Y1359486618/

Three Things You Can Expect From Today’s Most Innovative Storage Technologies

Storage ResourcesDownload an eBook, “Elements of Design: How the Data Center of Today Can Be the Data Center for Tomorrow”www.us.logicalis.com/hpdcebook

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