Digital Transformation: Why You Need a Storage Rethink

By: Gurpreet Singh, Managing Director at  Arrow PC Network

Today, the majority of enterprises is moving beyond the traditional storage solutions. Almost nine in ten are open to new ideas like software-defined storage (SDS).

The world continues to digitize quickly
We are witnessing many worldwide changes due to the digital transformation era. In under a decade, think how profoundly our personal and professional life has been affected by technology advancements.

India is no different. We are aware of the recent initiative taken by the Indian government flagship programme, ‘Digital India’, whose aim to encourage everybody to go digital. It’s just not the Govt. but in the entire IT industry, it’s a new wave. Everybody is going digital and following data-driven approach.

In today’s digital era, everything is data-driven!
Digital transformation, Big Data analytics, new regulations on protecting data and its security, and data-driven business strategies are fueling data growth to stellar proportions.

The question that arises is How to manage data explosion and to be able to extract accurate, actionable, strategic information in need?

As enterprise storage blossoms beyond terabytes to encompass tens or hundreds of petabytes, the challenges grow by degrees of magnitude. For some businesses, it may be essential to catalog different versions of data stored over time; for others it may be managing huge volumes of video/audio content. It can also range from emails to other memory-intensive data.

Each year, businesses are not only archiving more data, but are also required to house this data for years due to record retention policies and regulatory requirements. Concerns around data growth and its implications for data storage are at an all-time high.

As a result, many organizations’ are now re-evaluating their approach to storage and looking for a different approach which can support both business innovation and keep business plans on track.

Embrace Software-Defined Storage
Most industry professionals agree that SDS is an important next step in helping organisations address the user-generated data proliferation and storage challenges mentioned earlier.

The core characteristics for SDS infrastructures include:

1. Valuable Storage Features: SDS can overcome many of the siloed legacy platforms challenges by providing common hardware and delivering valuable storage features— flexibility, performance and scalability. Besides, it also provides features such as de-duplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup functionality.

2. Simple to Build & Manage: New capabilities can be added to legacy systems without buying new hardware as the functionality is determined by software instead of the features a vendor built into their hardware. Making the infrastructure far simpler to build, manage and scale.

When strategically implemented, SDS delivers a plethora of benefits. It reduces hardware costs and minimizes interoperability issues. It also eliminates the need to overprovision storage resources while maximizing utilization. Moreover, SDS adds capacity and compute power rather than adding more arrays. As available storage increases, performance automatically increases. SDS’s policy-based automation simplifies management and provides the ability to quickly adapt storage operations as business needs.

Remember, Digitization brings tremendous opportunities to IT industry, no matter what business you’re in. To be in sync with the technology advancements, organizations must remove physical, geographic and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that slow, interrupt or endanger their IT operations. It will dramatically improve operational processes—in turn, enabling organisations to uncover new value propositions for the business.