FEATURE: CLOUD MANAGEMENT
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Enterprise IT leaders are facing critical decisions on how to build a data-centric IT infrastructure that will allow them to harness the value of their data. Christian Putz, Director, Emerging Markets, EMEA, at Pure Storage, explains why an underlying all-flash cloud strategy will be a crucial component of such an endeavour.
The cloud should be considered in any modern storage strategy, and while the advantages of cloud models – simple, ondemand, elastic, and a driver for innovation – are beyond compelling, the path a company should take to a cloud-first strategy is not always easy to define.
Private, public or multi-cloud, in conjunction with software-as-a-service( SaaS) offerings, will deliver different benefits as part of a successful enterprise cloud strategy.
In addition, I believe that as data centre and application architectures change over the next decade, the future is in Data- Centric Architecture( DCA).
The concept is that tomorrow’ s architecture will be centred around a broadly-shared set of data services, which enable data to be freely shared by traditional and new web scale applications.
Enterprise IT leaders are facing critical decisions on how to build a DCA that will allow them to harness the value of their data, and their underlying cloud strategy will be a crucial component to success.
While considering the overall architecture and future of your cloud, there is one key step that should be part of any strategy: standardise on all-flash storage. Without all-flash storage, without a flexible and scalable all-flash architecture, the cloud falls apart. The performance, cost efficiencies, simplicity, agility and scalability you need cannot be achieved without all-flash storage as the cornerstone of your datacentric architecture.
So how do you get there from here? The first thing to recognise is that moving to the allflash cloud is not a one-step,“ rip everything out and start all over again” endeavour. Rather, it is a process that will take place over time, in three distinct stages:
Putting your first applications on all-flash storage
Every organisation has specific applications and workloads, such as databases supporting online transaction processing solutions for e-commerce, where the performance challenges of spinning disk storage are so difficult to overcome that you must modernise the underlying storage
Making the journey to the all-flash cloud
52 INTELLIGENTCIO www. intelligentcio. com