Data Storage Consolidation is Liberating for Enterprise and Service Providers

By Catherine Vlaeminck, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Infinidat

The burden of managing several different data storage systems in an enterprise data infrastructure has exceedingly put stress on IT teams, sending costs skyrocketing, creating unwanted complexity, and overly taxing companies with vendor sprawl.

IT leaders have had enough. CIOs and their information technology teams are increasingly streamlining infrastructure portfolios in enterprise organizations and service providers around the world. The rallying point is to consolidate workloads.

Storage consolidation reduces costs, improves agility, and lessens the complexity of dealing with too many vendors. To put it simply, it is liberating.

By consolidating four or five storage arrays into one, for instance, a company realizes the benefits of more efficient data-sharing and increased productivity of centralized management, as well as lower energy and floor consumption. Unified systems make data sharing across applications easier.

The challenges in the primary storage space are concerned with simplifying the IT process and managing the relentless growth of data in the face of increasing cyber security threats – all while consistently delivering to required SLAs, at scale, with the lowest possible TCO.

C-level executives simply want storage infrastructure to work, while IT leaders want to reduce risk and cost, make the manageability of the storage infrastructure as automated as possible, and minimize the effects of component failures.

To achieve these objectives, moving to denser workload consolidation is a smart strategy, especially for organizations that want to improve operational efficiency. A single system that can support petabytes of storage workload capacity is more efficient than multiple smaller systems.

Administrative productivity is better when managing the same amount of data in a single system. A single large system includes fewer components to fail. In addition, a “set it and forget it” approach with deep learning managed automation is naturally more desirable.

An increasing number of enterprises that we talk to are considering the consolidation of many storage workloads onto fewer systems, especially as they approach a storage refresh. The move to a private cloud gives an enterprise the opportunity to streamline and consolidate storage, reducing costs of data storage, while improving agility. 

Yet, the challenge has been capturing these benefits without impacting or being forced into unwanted compromises on availability, price, or performance. Understandably, they don’t want the increased risk of inadvertently increasing complexity, costs, and impracticality. Risk can lead  to compromises.

The good news is that businesses do not need to compromise performance, availability, manageability, agility, or cost while consolidating. Newer multi-tenant management capabilities and a different type of approach to building triple redundancy into the storage architecture make all of this possible. 

Industry analysts say that an enterprise should work with a vendor that has a primary focus on dense workload consolidation and a proven track record of doing it at scale. Infinidat has both the focus and history of continued customer success.  

Infinidat helps enterprise customers derisk their infrastructures through storage consolidation at petabyte scale. Infinidat’s unique ability to deliver an unmatched combination of high availability, exceptional performance, and the lowest possible TCO at scale enables enterprise storage consolidation in private cloud environments.

Leveraging the company’s strengths, Infinidat’s enterprise-class storage solutions meet the major requirements for consolidation. The InfiniBox platform is an ideal choice for a non-disruptive storage refresh, bringing the capacity and capabilities of multiple systems into one.

InfiniBox has a triple-redundant architecture that is software-defined, providing 100% availability, and intelligent data placement. Architectural innovations have contributed to the unique capabilities of InfiniBox. It handles a variety of different workloads cost-effectively.

Infinidat offers multiple consumption model options for flexibility, which makes consolidation as cost-effective as ever. CIOs can lower their total cost of ownership for storage, while improving their operational efficiency and deep learning capabilities with high performance and resilience.

Consolidation is also aligned with digital transformation, which is a common corporate objective for most enterprises. We see many organizations aggressively moving to scale their operations, improve their efficiency, and transform their business models toa future defined by a digital economy. There is profound acceleration of digital business models and digital operations driving new investment in transformational data infrastructure.

Furthermore, there is much greater threat today from ransomware attacks, and the need to invest in superior primary storage and data protection systems that have inherent cyber resilience and recovery capabilities.

One of the key ways our enterprise customers are meeting and achieving these objectives is through robust private cloud infrastructure with AIOps that enables petabyte-scale storage consolidation to reduce the costs of data storage and administrative tasks, while improving agility. 

Click here to read IDC analyst Eric Burgener’s “IDC Technology Spotlight” regarding data storage consolidation.

About Catherine Vlaeminck

Catherine Vlaeminck is Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Infinidat. She has led marketing functions for data storage and data management leaders for the past decade, steadily gaining an increasing range of responsibilities in various marketing leadership roles. Prior to joining Infinidat, she worked at CommVault and, before that, she worked for years at Fujitsu.