The IT world has become increasingly app-driven, supported and underpinned by containers and Kubernetes orchestration that deliver agile application creation and deployment.
Flexible consumption strategies are instrumental in delivering storage and resources that meet the needs of multiple workloads, in multiple locations, with capacity at scale and on demand.
This supports and enhances application development and workloads, by delivering flexible and instant access to capacity for both on-premises and cloud environments.
“Traditional storage procurement can take months, and this lack of agility is detrimental today as organisations cannot afford to let infrastructure hinder their development. Agility is key, and storage that is affordable, features high-performance speeds and can scale rapidly is essential. This, and of course at an affordable price,” says Hayden Sadler, Infinidat country manager for South Africa.
The public cloud is typically considered the only alternative, but in reality, challenges like data sovereignty, unplanned costs and bandwidth challenges make it ill-suited in many instances. What organisations really need is on-premises storage available on demand, to deliver capacity at scale, agility, speed to market, a better customer experience (CX) through real-time analytics and lower, more predictable costs.
A ‘pay as you grow’ pricing model is also vital. Using such a pricing strategy, organisations can immediately start using capacity to accommodate storage requirements. A typical example is a short-term project that requires capacity to be ramped up quickly. Then, when the project ends, capacity can be dialled down, along with the expense, just like with public clouds.
“Relentless growth and demand for storage capacity, along with petabyte scale workloads and applications, is changing the face of storage requirements, both globally and in South Africa. Locally, the requirement for storage at scale is typically seen in industries such as telecoms, financial services/insurance and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The challenges are the same for us as with international markets, but exacerbated by significant economic pressure. These cost effective, reliable and high-performance storage solutions are even more important,” says Sadler.
The goal should be to consolidate workloads to simplify operations, reduce cost and minimise vendor sprawl. Implementing reliable storage that does not compromise performance, scalability and cost is key for growing businesses. Storage needs to support evolving applications, with capacity at scale, on demand.