IS YOUR DATA STORAGE STRATEGY HOLDING YOU BACK OR HELPING YOU SOAR? A ROLTA ADVIZEX EBOOK

With Data Storage, It’s What’s in Store for the Future that MattersAs businesses look to drive innovation through information technology, one of the areas that is often overlooked is data storage. Enterprises tend to view storage as a cost center; they count on their storage capacity more or less doubling every two years, and on storage prices per gigabyte falling in a more or less equal amount. There might be new security concerns to consider, or new storage technologies to evaluate, but storage investments are often aimed at addressing current operational challenges rather than forward-looking business requirements.

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Storage investments are often aimed at addressing current operational challenges rather than forward-looking business requirements.

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This eBook challenges the traditional, prescriptive approach to data storage and offers up a better alternative: a predictive approach that aligns today’s storage investments with the business requirements of tomorrow. This viewpoint reflects our belief at Rolta AdvizeX that data storage is a strategic investment.

Data is not simply something to be stored and protected; it is the very source of the business information that will drive future strategies, sales and services. When you start to see data not as 1s and 0s but as the ideas and insights that drive better customer service and differentiate your business, you will look at your data storage strategy in a new and better light.

Data is not simply something to be stored and protected; it is the very source of the business information that will drive future strategies, sales and services.

When big data arrived, the focus naturally went to the data itself. The rise of mobile devices and social media meant that more people were generating more kinds of data, and a lot more of it than before. The real importance of big data has always been about the information that can be gleaned from it and leveraged in real-time business processes, from customer service to online marketing.

The next wave of big data will be driven largely by machines. With the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), many businesses expect a flood of new machine-based data streams that will feed into analytics platforms and tap into advanced machine learning. These systems will require a bimodal approach to storage that supports development and production processes in a seamless and automated fashion. This is an area where partners can play a significant role by helping to manage and automate day-to-day storage tasks so that internal IT resources can stay focused on leveraging business information rather than managing storage.

There is No Data, Only Insights You Haven’t Discovered Yet.

With the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), many businesses expect a flood of new machine-based data streams that will feed into automated analytics platforms and tap into advanced machine learning.

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An effective storage strategy is one that takes into account all types of data, especially ones that your organization is not yet leveraging, and grows in a way that maximizes the value of data-based business information while minimizing the cost and complexity. This is a very different strategy than the past, which sought to store the data and provide reasonable levels of security and access. Enterprises must now look to storage solutions that help them mine data more effectively and infuse data-driven insights into real-time business operations. More than simply expanding data capacity at a better price point, enterprises must invest in storage solutions that increase the value of their data. For this approach to work, however, they must have a storage architecture that allows them to quantitatively model the business value of the information that is mined from their data sets.

More than simply expanding data capacity at a better price point, enterprises must invest in storage solutions that increase the value of their data.

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Data storage procurement is often driven by the problems that an enterprise is facing today. At Rolta AdvizeX, our goal is to make sure that your next storage refresh doesn’t box you into a corner tomorrow. This can be as much art as science, and often takes shape around three very important questions.

1. How Do We Organize Our Data to Get More Value from it?Enterprises tend to look at their most demanding business applications when considering a storage upgrade, and basing their storage requirements on those demands. Yet this can be a costly mistake. The reality is that most enterprises have a mix of mission-critical and general-purpose data, each with their own requirements. Using a high-end solution (e.g., flash storage systems) for general-purpose data adds cost without delivering real value to the business. Similarly, a hyperconverged storage solution may be ideal for general-purpose storage, but can create latency issues for mission-critical applications. Understanding the different types of data storage requirements you have, and aligning these with the right technology, helps ensure a solid return on your storage investments.

Three Questions to Ask Before Your Next Storage Refresh

Understanding the different types of data storage requirements you have, and aligning these with the right technology, helps ensure a solid return on your storage investments.

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Today, the most effective way to get value from your data is through ad hoc analytics that can drive business insights. But enterprises also need to look ahead to the future when determining their storage requirements. Machine learning is an area that many have identified as a future competitive requirement. Such an initiative typically starts by creating a “data lake” within the data center that exists outside of the day-to-day production system. These projects can be storage intensive in the beginning, and the access requirements may be limited to a handful of data scientists.

The problem arises when the data scientists discover meaningful information in these data lakes; from that day forward, the data lake becomes a production operation. If the data lake wasn’t initially designed to meet the demands of a recoverable, operational system, problems will arise down the road that will compromise the performance, security and integrity of the data. For this reason, businesses need to build analytic systems—especially those in a DevOps or Agile development environment—with future production requirements in mind.

Enterprises need to look ahead to the future when determining their storage requirements. Machine learning is an area that many have identified as a future competitive requirement.

An effective data storage strategy is built around the informational requirements of the business. There is real-time information, such as analytic systems that feed into customer service applications; information that can be pulled into decision making; information that supports your operational systems, such as inventory management; and archival information that may support legal compliance or other aspects of the business. Each type of information has different requirements of access, performance and security.

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2. How Do We Deliver Information to Our Organization?

Each type of information has different requirements of access, performance and security.

Businesses that choose Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage solutions can benefit from the robust analytics of HPE’s InfoSight to ensure they get superior support, quality and predictive operations within their storage architecture.

At Rolta AdvizeX, we’ve found that enterprises often have limited visibility into how information is stored and distributed across their entire organization. Part of the problem is the distributed nature of enterprise storage systems, which often span multiple sites and several iterations of technology (tape, solid-state disk, virtual storage, etc.). Another challenge is the lack of a unified storage management and reporting system that provides reliable feedback on how information is being used in the enterprise. There are new tools available that provide this feedback, but these capabilities are largely dependent on the storage technology choices you make.

In order for organizations to select the right storage technologies for the future, their storage vendor’s approach to information and analytics should align with their own approach to storage. Businesses that choose HPE storage solutions, for example, can benefit from the robust analytics of HPE InfoSight to ensure they get superior support, quality and predictive operations within their storage architecture.

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3. How Do We Protect Our Information?

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It’s been said that storage devices do three things: read, write and fail. Ultimately, enterprises will never completely eliminate the risk of hardware failure, but they can control how quickly they recover from a failed drive or other event. Your storage infrastructure should be designed to protect your business across several different scenarios:

• Protection against information loss in the event of a hardware failure or natural disaster;

• Protection against cyber attacks such as data exfiltration and ransomware;

• Protection against the future (i.e., not being surprised by changes in the business).

• Minimization of operational disruption caused by any of these (and other) factors.

Traditional disaster recovery systems can account for data loss through hardware failures, natural disasters and human error. There are many recovery options for enterprises to consider, from hardware redundancy to cloud-based backups. Protecting against cyber attacks is often more complex, especially when new attacks such as ransomware are considered. In these cases, it’s best to have an isolated recovery system in place that features frequent backups. In addition, multi-layered snapshot technology is rapidly becoming a popular feature of automated data protection systems, as it allows for rapid recovery of critical assets from ransomware and other damaging malware attacks. An automated storage process that includes real-time reporting and actionable trigger capabilities can provide the visibility needed to proactively address storage issues as well as streamline future storage decisions.

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An automated storage process that includes real-time reporting and actionable trigger capabilities can provide the visibility needed to proactively address storage issues as well as streamline future storage decisions.

Over the years, best practices for storage strategies have emerged, from aligning flash storage with low-latency applications to leveraging cloud storage for disaster recovery of non-critical data. Yet the reality is that no single best practice is best for every application type or every business. The “right” storage solution is a composite of different solutions that addresses your requirements for application data, archiving, backup, analytics enablement and disaster recovery.

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What’s the Right Storage Technology for Your Business?

The “right” storage solution is a composite of different solutions that addresses your requirements for application data, archiving, backup, analytics enablement and disaster recovery.

Creating a storage strategy that works for your business begins with asking the right questions, such as:

• Will improving the performance or reliability of our mission-critical applications justify the investment in faster storage technology?

• Does it make sense to keep our general-purpose data in a legacy environment, or can we save money by moving it into a hyperconverged storage environment?

• What would happen to our flow of business information if we suffered a widespread ransomware attack tomorrow?

• How do compliance and privacy concerns affect our ability to move data into a hosted cloud environment?

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At Rolta AdvizeX, we see data storage as a strategic investment that impacts your business at many different points. We can help you identify those points of impact through our Storage Advizer services.

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Businesses that choose storage solutions from HPE gain access to a deep portfolio of products that include traditional storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, virtualization, archiving and data backup/recovery solutions.

For external storage solutions, HPE offers three unique and complementary options:

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HPE Storage: Flexible, Powerful, Reliable

• HPE 3PAR, the industry standard for enterprise data centers that require unparalleled scale and resilience;

• HPE Nimble, HPE’s newest storage platform, designed to deliver cloud-like efficiency and predictive insights into storage capacity and usage;

• The HPE XP7 appliance for large disk-based storage needs that demand the highest levels of availability and reliability.

3PAR Nimble XP7

HPE also offers different options for hyperconverged storage platforms:

• HPE SimpliVity, an advanced hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that offers unique features such as powerful data compression/deduplication capabilities;

• A large suite of platforms that are tested and approved for use in VMware vSAN architectures.

Finally, HPE customers have two choices for archival and backup storage systems:

• The HPE StoreOnce family of backup solutions for SMBs and enterprises;

• Scale-out storage solutions for file systems and archival needs from Qumulo, an HPE storage partner.

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Adopting a more strategic approach to data storage can be a daunting process. Multivendor solutions, islands of information and a wide variety of users can all contribute to a cloudy picture of your true storage requirements. This may have resulted in poor storage decisions in the past, from under planning for capacity to overpaying for high-end storage that ultimately wasn’t needed.

Rolta AdvizeX can help you avoid these mistakes in the future by creating a comprehensive multi-year storage strategy and aligning the right storage investments with your business goals. Our Storage Advizer service uses a proven methodology that focuses on identifying solution intent, audits the existing infrastructure for

gaps and offers remediation to fix those gaps. As part of the Advizer model, we design a cyclical review process so that businesses can continue to make aligned, informed storage choices as new requirements arrive or legacy systems approach their end of life.

Rolta AdvizeX also offers managed services to help businesses reduce their operational costs and ensure that storage performance and security meets service level requirements. To learn more about how Rolta AdvizeX and Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage solutions can give your business an information advantage, contact your Rolta AdvizeX representative or visit us online at advizex.com.

Taking the Next Steps Toward a Better Storage Strategy

Our Storage Advizer service uses a proven methodology that focuses on identifying solution intent, audits the existing infrastructure for gaps and offers remediation to fix those gaps.

About Rolta AdvizeXSince 1975, Rolta AdvizeX has been a provider of advanced information technology solutions that enable optimal business performance. Recognized for technical innovation and excellence, Rolta AdvizeX designs, implements and manages integrated solutions from the industry’s best strategic business partners.

Adhering to our ”clients for life” philosophy, Rolta AdvizeX is focused on creating long-term customer relationships supported by our highly skilled teams based around the world.

For more information on Rolta AdvizeX, visit us online at www.advizex.com.

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