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Hi. I'm Jeff Bowles with group. A boutique analyst and consulting firm focused on storage
solutions and practices. Today, I'm here to talk about emerging storage technologies.
That can make your business fundamentally different. A set of storage technologies that
we call intelligent storage. Those technologies are designed to make an expensive and complex
infrastructure easier and more flexible.
So your IT systems could be more agile and adaptable. Whether you're a business of 25
or a business of 10,000, storage complexity is starting to define your business challenge.
What the business needs is a foundation that make storage intelligent. A single unified
layer of technology that is so easy, so automated.
It's so flexible that the storage infrastructure becomes a deeply integrated part of the foundation
that keeps the business gears turning no matter what. So let's take a look at what we see
as the requirements for intelligent storage. Driven partly by ideas of the cloud and big
acquisitions of big storage innovators.
The past year has seen more recognition of the importance of scalability than ever before.
It may seem obvious that scale out technology has tremendous merit in large scale environments.
But the truth is these are not just large scale business problems. True scale-out can
scale storage without running out of horsepower, and those scale-out technologies are a right
fit for every size environment and they have even more benefit for SMB and SME environments
where scalability can open the doors for flexibility as well as pay as you go approaches to building
the infrastructure.
So what does it take to deliver true scale-out storage? First, the best scale-out technologies
we see today will start scaled and stay scaled. Look for a solution that comes out of the
box using the same architecture that you'll have after increasing your storage ten times.
That architecture will look distinctively different than solutions that add shelves
or span additional systems.
This gives a business a single perspective through which storage is managed and requires
no alteration when capacity or performance is grown. Second, true scale-out technologies
are built to deliver adaptable capacity and performance, and this will make your enterprise
more flexible. As your business faces demands for capacity or performance you can add either
by just adding storage nodes to a single storage system.
Third, truly scale-out technologies will scale resiliency at the same time they scale capacity.
to your performance. A storage foundation is only as strong as its weakest link. And
scaling storage shouldn't introduce new critical links, components, or bottlenecks that might
affect availability or data integrity.
These capabilities, altogether, unlock some serious benefits. Not only does storage stay
matched to your organization, but it can put an end to the everlasting cycle of periodic
upgrades and migrations, and even put an end to service downtimes. And looking beyond the
promises of flexible scalability in multiple dimensions, the next generation of intelligent
storage systems are also truly integrated.
So what's on my list for truly integrated storage? First, a storage system should integrate
with anything you need to store, to deliver a single storage system for every need. This
means a single unified storage system that can serve up block and file storage, and for
the SME the most common of these will be [xx], NFS and SIS.
Another is application integrations. Key integrations can optimize the performance and capabilities
of your storage systems by helping keep storage volumes thin, optimizing protection points
across volumes, or enabling easier storage operations for entire sets of virtual infrastructure.
A Is physical integration.
Of keen interest to the growing SME today's storage solutions are changing the way storage
is physical integrated with IT infrastructure. True scale out solutions can operate as a
cluster even while distributed across your infrastructure. Finally. Next generation of
intelligent storage, designed to make the business more agile and efficient, has to
be radically simplified.
Such solutions should be easy to manage out of the box but stay easy to manage no matter
what, but, with a single management approach that applies to all storage protocols and
pools. Storage that is added should automatically be added to the capacity performance behind
business systems. Storage planning should be reduced to simple indicators that identify
when a business needs more storage.
Adding storage should be reduced to just-in-time, pay-as-you-grow. The ploy exercise free for
migration pains, worry, and complex rebalancing. And finally, a system should not fundamentally
change in management irrespective of whether it is 3 nodes or 100, radical simplicity will
stay simple. All together truly scaleable storage deeply integrated and radically simplified
management is poised to change the way.
The SME does business. When joined together these capabilities can deliver a near revolution
in how the SME deploys and maintains a storage infrastucture. They add up to storage that
is seamlessly woven together where new capabilities can be woven in to that single unified storage
fabric. In a nut shell they can put an end to fundamentally bad practices that get in
the way of business agility.
Intelligent storage can make the business more intelligent.