Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 21 | Page 52

FEATURE : CLOUD MANAGEMENT
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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

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