Do you want to know what the biggest problem is with data centers? Data.
You need to process it, optimize it, store it, secure it, back it up and occasionally restore it. And the problem with data keeps growing because the data volumes themselves are growing as much as 50% year over year. The digital universe is expected to grow to 40ZB of Storage by 2020.
It’s no wonder that data centers are expensive to operate and maintain. Many enterprise data centers feature a variety of legacy storage technologies, from solid-state drives (SSDs) to storage area networks (SANs). Adding room for more data only adds more complexity as enterprises must add storage appliances, create new Fibre Channel zones, add LUN masking, etc. And that complexity is only copied when it’s time to back up that data.
What enterprises really need to manage their data is simplicity—or, to be exact, SimpliVity. SimpliVity created some very cool technology that performs data deduplication, compression and optimization in the moment of inception, and maintains that optimized state throughout the life of that data. Today, SimpliVity is available as part of HPE’s hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), which makes a good thing (the HPE Synergy platform) even better.
Having a single, global copy of optimized data in your data center is a very good thing. It reduces the size of your data, a lot—by a magnitude of ten times or more. In other words, you can compress 100TB of data into 10TB or less. And unlike other data compression technologies, you don’t need to “rehydrate” compressed data with SimpliVity to use it; it stays compressed for the life of the data. That results in another important benefit: you can restore a 1TB virtual machine from backup with SimpliVity in less than 60 seconds. It’s guaranteed!
When we talk to enterprises, we hear the same challenges expressed again and again.
Their data centers are complex to manage and inefficient to operate. Data backup and archiving has become too time- and cost-consuming. Data storage costs are spiraling out of control. At Rolta AdvizeX, we understand the complexity issues around legacy storage systems because we’ve been building data center solutions for decades. And we believe that hyper-converged infrastructure combined with powerful data optimization can solve many of those issues.
In essence, by combining HCI with SimpliVity, enterprises are buying a complete data center in a box. Everything they need—storage capacity, CPUs, networking, data backup, disaster recovery, optimization—can be purchased in an x86-based, two-unit box and deployed in a matter of minutes. No recabling, FC rezoning or LUN masking is required. When you need more capacity, you simply buy another node. That kind of granular scalability is important, especially when you consider how many enterprises are budget-strapped and still end up overbuying storage capacity.
With so many enterprises focused on data center consolidation, HCI is on the mind of a lot of CIOs. And while server consolidation or storage consolidation is important, data consolidation is probably the most important single thing that enterprises can do to improve their data center’s operational efficiency. By adding SimpliVity to their HCI story, HPE has come up with a compelling solution to a very big and very common problem.
It’s a story we’d love to share with you. Call us or contact us online and we’ll be happy to arrange a meeting to discuss how hyper-convergence and data optimization can bring your data center into a hyper-efficient state. ▪