The orientation of an organisation’s IT environment is critical to its success in the digital economy. 5-10 years ago, the traditional IT environment existed predominately on-premises, typically in a data centre located in the head office or close by. However, we’ve seen a continual migration away from those environments with the introduction and continued growth of the cloud, both private and public.
Initially, the thought was to move everything into the cloud to leverage better accessibility, development and cost benefits. But over time, it’s become evident that the most suitable and practical makeup of an environment is one that is hybrid, that being an environment where workloads exist on-premises, as well as in the private and public cloud.
The benefits of a hybrid environment are plenty, but with workloads situated across a multitude of locations, there’s added complexity, which can present a number of challenges for organisations, particularly around storage.
At Lexel, we partner with HPE and Intel® to deliver and support complex infrastructure environments. In a lot of data centres we deploy HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, built with HPE ProLiant servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor; an intelligent platform that combines the flexibility of converged with the simplicity of hyperconverged infrastructure for the data centre and cloud.1 On-premises storage doesn’t seem to get as much coverage as the cloud elements of a hybrid environment, so in an attempt to bridge the gap, we’ve outlined five burning questions regarding on-premises storage.
1. What are the key challenges for storage today?
There’s a number of challenges associated specifically to stored data today. Organisations must be agile and have the ability to respond to changing demands, the ongoing effects of COVID-19 are a great example of this. At any given time, data needs to be ready to move, which can cause headaches in terms of availability and its security status. Which are the two constants when it comes to stored data, it needs to be as close as possible to 100% available at all times whilst also being protected from potential loss, breach or disaster.
Additionally, datasets are growing exponentially, there’s been an explosion of data in recent years courtesy of analytics platforms and big data tools that leverage it in ways we never would have imagined only a handful of years ago. This creates the challenge of how to manage that growth and still protect it. And when you consider a lot of these workloads are currently being run on legacy infrastructure in their own silos, it’s incredibly challenging to correctly manage.
2. What new demands has the growth of cloud put on storage?
The big one is the exponential data growth that we discussed earlier. Both cloud-native and legacy applications are generating unfathomable amounts of data each and every day which puts increased strain on your storage. To maintain a smooth and operational environment, you need on-premises storage that delivers high availability, is scalable enough to deal with the growing and changing demands, has portability functions that can facilitate mobility to the cloud, and over and above all, is easily manageable. It’s for these reasons that we see a lot of organisations choosing to leverage HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, built with HPE ProLiant servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor.
3. What’s the business-case for HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?
It’s quite simple when you unpack the key elements of a solution like HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, built with HPE ProLiant servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, it is:
- Platform intelligence: Incredibly easy to setup, with a less than 15 minute deploy time, manage exclusively in VMware® vCenter, the platform allows you to focus on app upgrades and services development, not infrastructure.*
- Incredibly resilient: Leverage 99.9999% guaranteed availability to handle unpredictable demands. It provides high end data protection with encryption, over-the-wire protection and the ability to handle three simultaneous drive failures without going down.*
- Highly scalable: No need to over cater, with this platform you are able to add onto the resources needed with the flexibility to grow compute and storage independently when needed, and extended across a hybrid cloud without any interruption.*
* https://www.hpe.com/au/en/product-catalog/detail/pip.hpe-nimble-storage-dhci.1011825973.html
4. What needs to be considered before implementing a solution like this?
For Lexel, when we look at an organisation’s environment, it’s critical for us to understand their current situation, what workloads they’re working with, the infrastructure they’re running them on and the challenges that they’re currently experiencing. Once we understand this, we can then explore where the organisation wants to be, what they want their environment to do and ultimately, what business outcomes they’re looking to improve or generate from scratch.
Once we have a clear and defined understanding of the organisation’s requirements, we make recommendations that are backed by experience and science. For a lot of organisations, this will mean a hybrid IT environment with flash storage in the data centre. It delivers a scalable, repeatable platform that is designed, tested and documented by Lexel to address the business requirements, workloads and applications outlined during the discovery phase of the project.
5. What business outcomes does storage dHCI help to facilitate?
Having HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, built with HPE ProLiant servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor as a component to your overall environment means leveraging a highly available platform, which enables organisations to primarily focus on running their business. The simplicity of management means admins spend significantly less time managing and more time innovating. While the ability to scale compute and storage independently means you’re prepared for the unpredictable and can scale efficiently.
Having this platform in your data centre allows for complete control over where your data is stored, making regulatory compliance requirements a non-issue, as well as following best-practice backup and DR policies.
At Lexel, our team have a wealth of experience in implementing HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, built with HPE ProLiant servers powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, solutions to global best practice standards, and we know complex infrastructure inside out. We’ll recommend solutions and services that deliver best value to your organisation, both now and in the future. Lexel can help businesses with the lack of knowledge and expertise in the market to optimise their hybrid IT platform to suit their unique needs and yield stronger results for the betterment of your organisation.
Contact Lexel today to discuss your business challenges and where we can help you discover greater agility and control in your IT environment.
[1] https://www.hpe.com/au/en/storage/nimble-storage-dhci.html
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