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Why Storage Server Products Are the Key to Business Agility

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Customers expect fast, reliable service no matter where in the world they are, accessing your applications and data from an expanding array of mobile devices and browsers. At the same time, new opportunities emerge all the time as digital transformation accelerates across industries, shortening the window of opportunity to capitalize on emerging trends.

To keep up with these demands and seize new opportunities, companies need infrastructure that offers flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. This is where the right storage solutions come in. With the right server products handling your data storage needs, you’ll gain the agility needed to respond to changes and fuel your business growth.

Let’s learn why storage server products are the key to business agility by scrolling below.

Consolidate Silos with Shared Storage

With shared storage, whether block-, file or object-based, any data center server or application has pooled access to the same data volumes.

  • This encourages seamless collaboration across teams that now view and leverage common information sets together.
  • It also simplifies management enormously by giving administrators a single pane of glass for monitoring overall capacity, performance metrics and usage trends from one unified view.
  • No longer is valuable engineering or scientific data stuck in a departmental silo, unavailable to fuel new product categories.
  • Marketing doesn’t have to wait for IT to provision new storage each time they want to launch a campaign.
  • And finance gains instant access to transactional systems and reports formerly walled off from their purview.

Consolidating silos is the first step to breaking down data barriers within your organization for a more cohesive operation.

Scale-on-Demand with Modular Expansion

To keep pace with changing needs, your storage infrastructure must scale easily on demand. Server products that use modular building blocks allow you to start small and non-disruptively expand capacity and performance by adding new components as you require them. This “scale-out” model ensures your storage scales synchronously with your business without over-provisioning. You pay only for what you need and can avoid costly forklift upgrades.

Accelerate Apps and Workloads

Storage speed is critical for application and workload performance. Look for products with flash-based acceleration that can turbocharge performance-sensitive applications and mixed workloads. With flash pools optimized for random I/O, your database queries, virtual desktops and other latency-dependent tasks will see a dramatic speed boost. Users enjoy a more responsive experience while you maximize existing compute resources.

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Streamline Backup and DR

Reliable backup and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities ensure business continuity. Modern storage servers simplify these processes by integrating data protection software and targetless snapshots. This eliminates complex backup software and hardware. Inline variable block deduplication and compression also shrink backup windows. Remote replication tools provide synchronous or asynchronous replication to a secondary site for failover protection, if needed.

Optimize Storage Tiering

To get the most value from your storage investments, it’s important to place data on the appropriate tier. Server products with automated tiering policies migrate data between flash, disk and cloud tiers based on I/O patterns and business priorities. Hot blocks are cached on flash for low-latency access, while cold blocks move to an economical disk. Infrequently accessed data can be tied to the cloud for deep archiving. This ensures your storage delivers the best balance of performance and cost.

Leverage Hybrid Cloud

In today’s world, it’s wise to leverage both on-premises and public cloud resources. Storage servers that support a unified storage pool spanning on-premises and public cloud environments allow you to burst workloads to the cloud for flexibility. You gain hybrid cloud server efficiencies and pay only for the cloud capacity used. Files and objects can also be natively integrated with S3-compatible object stores for cloud archiving and tiering.

Simplify Management

Complex storage administration slows productivity and innovation. Look for server products with AI-powered storage intelligence that automates repetitive tasks and proactively detects and fixes issues through machine learning. Cloud-based management portals should provide a single pane of glass for monitoring, reporting and managing all your storage infrastructure from anywhere. This streamlines daily operations and frees up your team for more strategic work.

Ensure Data Security

With sensitive data on the line, security cannot be an afterthought. Choose storage solutions that incorporate multilayered security techniques like encrypted data at rest and in flight, role-based access control, and active security hardening. Look for products certified to strict security standards like FIPS 140-2. Regular vulnerability scans and automated firmware updates further strengthen your defenses against evolving cyberthreats. Your data will remain protected, no matter where it resides.

Support Containers and Virtualization

To leverage the agility of DevOps approaches, your storage needs tight integration with containers and virtualization. Server products that provide container volumes, virtual storage pools and virtual machine-aware data services let you seamlessly deploy stateful containerized applications alongside virtual machines. Developers enjoy a unified environment for agile app development, testing and deployment.

Optimize Cost with All-Flash Performance

For mission-critical applications that require the highest performance, all-flash storage servers are the answer. With no moving parts to limit IOPS and latency, Flash delivers incredible speed and predictable low latencies at scale. This allows you to consolidate multiple high-performance data center systems onto a single all-flash array, saving you money versus maintaining many individual servers. Flash also uses less power and space than spinning disks, further cutting operational expenses.

Reduce Complexity with Converged Infrastructure

Consolidating compute and storage resources into a single converged or hyper-converged infrastructure solution is an increasingly popular approach. It simplifies deployment and management by integrating servers, storage, networking and virtualization software into an integrated appliance. This “appliance approach” removes the complexity of integrating individual components and managing the interaction between systems.

Future-Proof Your Environment

To keep your infrastructure current as technology progresses, choose scalable storage platforms with a roadmap of continuous innovation. Look for products with a history of new feature additions in response to customer and market demands. This future-proofs your environment and ensures new capabilities are added non-disruptively through software upgrades alone. You can stay on top of emerging workloads like AI and ML and meet evolving business needs for years to come.

Conclusion

With the right storage server products handling your data, you’ll gain the flexibility and scalability required to rapidly adapt to market changes. Consolidating storage resources, leveraging flash acceleration, simplifying management and supporting cutting-edge technologies allow businesses to innovate faster. Make the right selection, and your infrastructure becomes the enabler rather than the inhibitor of business agility and growth.

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