Tech Journal
Think Twice Before You Modernize
Storage With Cloud
By Phil Mogavero / 17 Sep 2019 / Topics: Cloud Storage
By Phil Mogavero / 17 Sep 2019 / Topics: Cloud Storage
Many businesses are looking to break free from yesterday’s on-premises storage solutions and embrace a cloud-first mentality. It’s no wonder why: legacy storage hardware has increasingly become a burden to manage, can be difficult to upgrade and in many cases is unable to keep up with growing workload demands.
While the decision to modernize your storage environment is a shrewd one, the idea of going cloud-first requires deeper thought.
A number of businesses have made cloud-first their standard, simply because they could.
In recent years, a number of businesses have made cloud-first their standard, simply because they could – and not because they deemed the workload an especially good fit for the cloud. Consequently, many of these businesses have experienced pitfalls that limit – or altogether negate – the benefits they were hoping to realize from migration.
Businesses should take a more thoughtful approach to storage modernization. Rather than committing all applications and data to the cloud regardless of their fit, customers should assess which applications are good candidates. Those looking to achieve lower costs, greater agility or less complexity can leverage a combination of physical and virtual technologies from established storage leaders, such as HPE, Dell EMC and NetApp, to best complement their workloads:
Let’s dive deeper into the advantages of using SSA and HCI to support your critical applications and explore some of the best offerings in market.
SSAs contain multiple flash memory drives to deliver high performance and guaranteed low latency for your compute-intensive workloads. Unlike yesterday’s hard disk drive-powered storage offerings, today’s all-flash offerings have no moving parts. This means they run cooler, reducing the risk of overheating and saving you on energy costs. Three SSAs worth your consideration are HPE Primera, Dell EMC Unity and NetApp C190.
According to IDC, HPE Primera combines “the simplicity of Nimble Storage, the mission-critical heritage of 3PAR and the intelligence of InfoSight.” The result is an enterprise-grade storage solution that provides, among other capabilities:
Dell EMC Unity is an all-flash array that can scale to 150TB and starts at under $18K. This solution is simple to rack and stack because it comes in an integrated 2U design with full block and file storage. This design significantly reduces cabling and power needs. Unity is designed for virtualization, offering tight VMware, Microsoft and OpenStack integrations for enterprise and transactional NAS, SAN and VMware deployments. Additionally, it supports no-cost plug-ins for VMware and Microsoft virtualization admins. Further advantages include:
NetApp C190 is a new all-flash solution that can connect directly to the public cloud and starts below $20K. By leveraging NetApp ONTAP software, you get enterprise-class data services, hybrid cloud support, and data reduction capabilities. This offering gives customers:
HCI consolidates compute, storage, memory and virtualization into a single appliance, making it easier to manage these resources and how they support your applications. HCI solutions offer several advantages: they enable simplistic replication between your onpremises and cloud environments, they’re easy to manage and scale out like building blocks and they provide lower total cost of ownership than legacy solutions. Offerings that stand out in the market are Dell VxRail and HPE SimpliVity 380 with Nutanix.
Dell EMC VxRail is a great solution for customers looking to modernize their data center or implement a hybrid cloud. That’s because VxRail is pre-integrated with VMware vSAN, giving you a foundation to run on VMware Cloud. This means it is 100% manageable by VMware vCenter, helping you to dramatically simplify IT operations and your path to hybrid cloud implementation. Additional advantages include:
In April 2019, HPE and Nutanix announced a global partnership to deliver Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software on HPE hardware. This partnership entails the combined offering of managed hybrid cloud infrastructure, residing in customer data centers. One of these offerings is HPE SimpliVity 380 with Nutanix. This appliance gives you:
This article provides a good overview of the technologies and providers you should consider when modernizing storage. However, to ensure smooth deployment and on-going management, it can be helpful to leverage a storage consultant, like Insight. Our team provides a number of services that streamline your modernization efforts:
Vice President of Hybrid Data Center
Mr. Mogavero serves as Vice President of the Hybrid Data Center Practice at Insight. He is responsible for the vision, strategy and execution in order to grow the revenue and associated Insight Services for Insight strategic Hybrid Data Center Partners; including Cisco, HPE, Dell/EMC, VMWare, NetApp, Veritas, Veeam, Citrix and others. Mr. Mogavero has direct management for marketing, presales, delivery, certifications, customer success and vendor operations. Mr. Mogavero works closely with the sales organization and other practice leaders to develop synergy, increase customer value and drive overall Insight success.
Data Center Solution Architect
Victor Kruse is a Data Center Solution Architect with over 20 years of experience in the Industry. Currently at Insight, Victor supports best-in-class solutions involving; On and Off Prem Cloud, Virtualization, Standardization, Orchestration, Automation, and Recovery.
