If you’re at the early stages of evaluating a storage refresh, it’s likely not your favorite project, but it holds significant weight for the future of your organization. Enterprise storage systems aren’t refreshed often, and that’s understandable. However, if it’s been a few years since your last upgrade, you’re likely facing a very different technology environment.

From AI to ransomware to hybrid cloud, enterprise data environments now face increasing demands for scale, complexity, and alignment with broader business strategies. The question is no longer about capacity alone. It’s whether your storage is intelligent, secure, and designed to support long-term business outcomes. In this blog article, we’ll walk through the key challenges driving today’s storage refreshes and explore solutions to help you make a confident, future-focused decision.

The Storage Challenges You Can’t Ignore

Gone are the days when bigger and faster hardware was all you needed. Your next enterprise storage solution needs to do far more. Organizations are shifting toward AI-integrated operations and hybrid cloud environments.

Consider the following modern challenges:

1. AI is transforming workloads: AI adoption is now mainstream across industries, increasing demand for data-intensive operations. AI-optimized storage systems are essential for managing exponential data growth and ensuring smooth integration with frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.
2. Ransomware attacks aren’t going anywhere: You can’t afford to assume ransomware won’t happen to you. A true enterprise storage solution with ransomware protection is non-negotiable.
3. Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are the norm: Organizations need an enterprise hybrid cloud storage solution that can adapt to on-premises and cloud-native needs.
4. Compliance is getting stricter: From GDPR to HIPAA, your storage must help you meet growing regulatory requirements without constant manual oversight.
5. Edge computing is shifting data flows: Storage must now account for distributed workloads and deliver consistent data services across environments.

When you look at this picture, the real question becomes: Is your current storage solution up to the job?  Your next storage solution must deliver what a scalable software-defined storage solution offers: adaptable performance, cost-effective expansion, and intelligent automation.

Why Your Next Storage Solution Should Be Built For AI

AI and machine learning adoption are reshaping enterprise IT priorities. If you’re using or planning to use AI-based workloads, your infrastructure must support the increased strain and throughput. An AI-powered enterprise storage solution is essential to ensure sustained performance and effective resource usage.

Solutions that are optimized for AI offer:

• Real-time auto-tiering to match data placement with access needs.
• Predictive analytics that automate workload balancing and resource allocation.
• Built-in integration with popular AI and ML frameworks for smooth data flow.
• Smart fault detection that resolves issues before they interrupt operations.

Dell PowerScale, for example, delivers up to 200% faster streaming performance, making it ideal for data preparation, training, and inference. Similarly, PowerMax uses autonomous monitoring and proactive correction to support uninterrupted AI pipelines. Storage systems like these can absorb AI growth without requiring re-architecture down the line.

Protecting Your Data From Ransomware

Modern ransomware can now target backup systems, making traditional data protection strategies ineffective. That’s why an enterprise storage solution with ransomware protection should be one of your top priorities during a refresh.

Look for features like:

• Immutable backups that prevent deletion or tampering.
• Air-gapped recovery environments to protect backup integrity.
• Real-time anomaly detection based on access pattern analysis.
• Encryption at rest and in transit to prevent unauthorized data exposure.

CryptoSpike, available in PowerStore, is engineered specifically for this. It identifies unusual behavior, stops potential attackers by locking their accounts, and allows for file-level restoration. These features ensure security and rapid recovery if an attack occurs.

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Storage Is The Future

More organizations are now operating in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. In these cases, the storage infrastructure must support consistent data services across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises deployments. An enterprise hybrid cloud storage solution provides that bridge.

The key benefits include:

• Unified management across platforms.
• Flexible deployment options that scale with business growth.
• Data mobility that supports compliance, analytics, and performance optimization.

Dell PowerFlex offers a single system that combines compute, storage, and network. It is ideal for Kubernetes, VM-based workloads, and large enterprise databases. Whether you’re running critical workloads in the cloud or keeping them on-prem for regulatory reasons, hybrid cloud-compatible storage helps you stay aligned with both business and IT goals.

Software-Defined Storage Is The Smarter Way Forward

Traditional hardware-centric storage systems can limit your growth and increase costs. A scalable software-defined storage solution gives you freedom from these limitations. You can expand capacity on demand and adjust resources as business needs change.

For example, Dell PowerScale can grow from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes without requiring downtime. It supports high-throughput, unstructured data workflows, making it valuable for research institutions, healthcare providers, and digital media enterprises. With up to 3:1 compression, it allows you to manage large files like images, videos, or telemetry data more economically.

Refreshing With Confidence

Many IT leaders avoid refresh projects because they’re complex and time-consuming. With guidance from WEI, customers turn to Dell’s Tech Refresh Program to change that:

• Expert assessment and planning to align storage with your business objectives.
• Minimal disruption during implementation.
• Free and responsible disposal of old hardware to support circular economy goals.

By leveraging an expert-led approach, you can remove the risk and guesswork from the refresh process. Whether you need to improve AI readiness, strengthen ransomware defenses, or shift toward hybrid architectures, the right partner can make your transition a success.

Final Thoughts

Your next storage refresh is more than upgrading hardware, but a strategic move that sets the foundation for innovation, data security, and operational resilience. That’s why partnering with experts like WEI makes all the difference. With proven experience in delivering modern enterprise storage solutions, WEI helps you define clear goals, choose the right technologies, and execute a refresh that supports your long-term strategy.

Reach out to WEI today to learn how your organization can build a future-ready storage strategy that delivers real business value.

Next Steps: Between AI adoption, hybrid cloud, and cyber threats, your next storage refresh needs to do more than just expand capacity…it must futureproof your infrastructure.

This exclusive tech brief from WEI and Dell Technologies breaks down everything you should demand from your next storage solution. Download our exclusive tech brief,  

• How to protect against ransomware with immutable backups and cyber recovery vaults
• Why AI-optimized storage is key to performance and data growth
• What hybrid cloud and edge computing mean for storage design
• How to simplify lifecycle management with Dell’s Tech Refresh Program

The post Is It Time For A Storage Refresh? What Every IT Leader Should Know appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

It is not uncommon for a homegrown data protection strategy to encounter scalability challenges in an evolving IT environment as demands from rapid data growth, lifecycle management, and ransomware protection inevitably surface. Such was the case for a prominent enterprise software company that was in need of a modernized approach to data protection. With assistance from WEI, the customer evaluated Rubrik’s enterprise-class backup and recovery solution, aiming for a comprehensive enterprise data protection approach that enhanced its cyber resilience against ransomware threats and ensured its
mission-critical workloads were protected at scale.

The implementation of Rubrik’s Zero Trust Architecture, centralized
management platform, and advanced recovery capabilities not only protected
the customer’s AWS and Azure environments from ransomware, but also
lowered cyber insurance premiums, decreased recovery times and simplified
their IT operations.

The Challenge: Securing Data in a Modern IT Environment

How to improve upon an existing data protection strategy while continuing to deliver the software solutions its customers required served as the primary challenge. The company’s existing homegrown data backup solution lacked appropriate database protections, leaving the company susceptible to modern ransomware attacks. The lack of visibility into their cloud workloads also hindered their ability to effectively monitor and manage their cloud backup strategy. Decentralized management tools and reporting challenges made it a challenge to manage backups at scale. These issues impacted the company’s cyber resilience and recovery speed.

Watch: CVS & WEI: Growing Together

Identifying Solutions Through WEI’s Intensive Assessment Process

WEI focused on developing deeper insights into the customer’s evolving needs of their IT environment, and through this, identified additional considerations for cost savings and optimizations. This included cloud storage costs associated with utilizing AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for snapshots of the environment versus lower cost storage tiers. To address these challenges and protect the company’s data, WEI needed to transform the company’s backup and recovery strategies and deploy a more effective solution.

WEI leveraged its relationship with Rubrik, a cloud data management and data security solution provider, to help build an effective backup and recovery strategy that addressed the customer’s challenges. Rubrik’s enterprise-class backup and recovery solution provides the comprehensive data protection WEI’s customer needed to fortify its cyber resilience. Rubrik’s Zero Trust architecture offers sophisticated security features for online backups, including unalterable snapshots and both encryption at-rest and in-transit which protect the company’s mission-critical workloads against cyber threats. The solution’s advanced recovery capabilities also improved the company’s cyber resilience program, offering on-demand rapid recovery at scale.

Watch: WEI Lifts United Site Services From Paper-Based Operations

Rubrik’s centralized management platform and single-pane-of-glass interface unify and standardize data management across the software company’s AWS and Azure deployments. Rubrik’s world-class reporting resources also provide the data and essential insights to promote more informed decision making. With tiered storage options, the cloud data backup solution also allows the company to place data in the most appropriate tier to minimize storage-related expenditures.

To demonstrate the operational benefits and cost efficiency of Rubrik over AWS native tools, WEI and Rubrik partnered to conduct a proof of concept (POC) for the customer. During this process, the customer validated the technology and assessed operational improvements that were made possible by the solution. Upon exiting a successful POC, the customer purchased the solution to improve their backup and recovery strategy and achieve significant cost savings.

Measured Outcomes

Improved Backup Management Bolsters Cyber Resilience

A comprehensive enterprise data protection strategy for the client has resulted in streamlined data security to simplify IT management, reduce risk of data loss, and enhance its resiliency against cyberattacks and downtime. The company can also manage backups at scale to accelerate recovery times and elevate operational efficiency.

Substantial Cost Savings & Efficiencies

Replacing its existing AWS native cloud storage services with Rubrik’s low-cost, long-term storage is estimated to save the company approximately $27 million over five years. In addition, the company will also benefit from lower cyber insurance premiums with the new solution’s robust data protections.

Strategic Insights Support Future Planning

Rubrik’s powerful cloud management tool and single pane view offer robust, yet simplified IT management functionality that can help the customer identify optimization opportunities. With increased visibility into the cloud environment, the company can build strategic insights that can drive future planning and enable improved cost effectiveness and data security. The combination of heightened awareness and enhanced management capabilities also empowers the company’s internal FinOps team to monitor cloud spend proactively to identify and justify if rising cloud costs are necessary to support the business or if adjustments are needed for operational and cost efficiency. The savings achieved through better controlled cloud costs can be reinvested in the business to continually develop software solutions that enrich project outcomes and the customer experience.

Watch: World-Class Technology Services By WEI

Talk To WEI Today

WEI’s experienced architects engaged with the customer in meaningful conversations around backup and recovery and conducted a thorough assessment of its existing data protection landscape. Through this process, WEI gained an in-depth understanding of the company’s existing situation as well as its business-specific, forward-looking needs.

To explore the potential cost savings, operational efficiencies, and cyber resilience your company can achieve with a modern backup and recovery solution, contact WEI for an assessment of your cloud data protection strategies.

Next Steps: A shareable asset of this case study may be accessed by selecting the button below.

The post Enterprise Software Company Modernizes Data Protection Strategy With WEI appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Despite the widespread benefits of public cloud computing, concerns around security, data protection, and data sovereignty are what lead 80% of businesses to adopt a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, combining public and private cloud environments. Enterprise hybrid cloud approaches, while advantageous, introduce complexities – especially in geographically distributed management. Let’s explore challenges in private cloud management and proven effective solutions.

Why Private Cloud Matters

A study by revealed that 62% of organizations cite the following factors as the primary reasons for migrating workloads away from the public cloud:

• Data security protection and leakage
• Data locality and sovereignty

Despite significant cloud migration and container adoption, a substantial portion of data center workloads continue to be managed through on-premises private cloud environments. Industry forecasts predict that by 2027, 50% of data center workloads will still be managed through traditional hypervisor-based virtualization outside the public cloud. This trend can be attributed to several priorities, including security and data residency.

Industries such as finance, healthcare, and government prioritize maintaining complete control over their data, making private cloud environments a highly attractive solution.

The Challenges of Private Cloud Management

Private clouds provide a unique combination of control, security, performance, predictability, and flexibility to complement today’s modern enterprise IT needs. This resonates with of IT leaders who believe that establishing a mature on-premises private cloud operations model is critical for optimizing operational efficiency and agility.

However, of these same leaders acknowledge limitations in their current data management capabilities. This is because managing a private cloud environment presents the following challenges that hinder an organization:

Complex Hybrid Infrastructure

The integration of private clouds within hybrid environments requires constant provisioning and resource orchestration across disparate cloud ecosystems. This lack of uniformity creates inconsistent resource management, leading to inefficiencies, operational roadblocks, and increased security risks.

Here’s where solutions like can empower your IT team to navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud management.

• Self-service agility and a unified cloud operational experience across your on-premises environment and your entire hybrid cloud.
• Streamlining daily tasks beyond initial deployment with automation and industry-leading AIOps powered by .
• Hybrid cloud virtual machines (VMs) are delivered on demand with flexible payment options.

Limited High Availability for Workloads

High availability is key for critical applications, but traditional virtualization struggles to deliver, especially at the edge.

Existing virtualization solutions typically offer four-nines (99.99%) availability. To keep up with the demand, solutions like guarantee six-nines data availability for both business-critical applications and general-purpose VMs deployed on-premises. Furthermore, HPE GreenLake offers five-nines uptime specifically designed for distributed edge sites.

Depending on your enterprise requirements, HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud provides flexibility by offering a choice of six-nines or five-nines availability for your VMs, ensuring industry-leading uptime while maintaining complete on-premises data control.

Watch: Adapting To The Evolving Education Tech Landscape

Management Complexity 

Traditional private cloud deployments can become bogged down in the complexities of VM management, often requiring specialized knowledge for even routine tasks. This restricts your IT generalists’ agility and self-service capabilities and burdens your team with time-consuming maintenance activities.

An effective managed private cloud solution should enable your team to:

• Consolidate management of VMs and infrastructure across your entire hybrid cloud environment – on-premises and public cloud – from a single, intuitive console.
• Create and protect VMs both on-premises and in the public cloud through a self-service portal, streamlining workflows and boosting productivity.
• Leverage automation and industry-leading AIOps capabilities to automate repetitive tasks, reducing the need for specialized domain expertise.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud recognizes the critical role IT plays in driving business success. By streamlining VM management through a single, intuitive console, HPE GreenLake empowers IT teams to shift their focus away from repetitive tasks and towards strategic initiatives that deliver real business value.

Slow Time to Value

Building a private cloud environment, whether managed or part of an enterprise hybrid cloud like , can take many resources. The traditional approach involves designing, procuring, implementing, and deploying the necessary hardware and software, which can significantly delay the benefits the cloud could bring your business.

HPE GreenLake recognizes this challenge and offers the following to unlock the full potential of your private cloud:

• Pre-configured solutions to eliminate lengthy design and procurement processes, which significantly reduces implementation and deployment times.
• Optimized private cloud setup process to expedite time-to-value, enabling your organization to capitalize on business opportunities sooner.

IT Complexity for Virtual Workloads

Customers increasingly seek ways to reduce the complexity associated with managing virtual workloads. To address these challenges, customers require standardized solutions that provide a consistent and simplified approach to managing virtual workloads across all their environments.

A well-rounded private cloud solution, such as HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud, provides a highly automated virtualized infrastructure with built-in AIOps and predictive analytics. This streamlines infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management, while also proactively anticipating and automatically addressing potential issues before they can disrupt your workloads.

Operational Efficiency

Complex virtual environments can be a challenge for even the most well-resourced IT teams. HPE GreenLake offers a solution that streamlines VM infrastructure management, optimizes cost and resource allocation, and frees up valuable IT staff to focus on driving innovation – like application development and deployment.

Scalability

As business demands evolve, organizations require scalable virtualized resources to support deployments across various environments. Adaptable and cost-optimized solutions are critical for managing workloads efficiently, regardless of size or location.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition offers user-friendly all-in-one solutions specifically designed for edge deployments, ensuring exceptional uptime reliability and built-in data protection across diverse locations – including core data centers, colocation facilities, and cloud environments. This flexibility empowers organizations to seamlessly scale or expand projects with variable payment options for maximum financial agility.

Empowering Your Private Cloud

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition offers a powerful solution for managing various cloud environments. Here are five prime scenarios where HPE GreenLake shines:

1. Scalable Virtualized Applications and Mixed Workloads: This solution is perfect for businesses running virtualized applications and mixed workloads that require easy scaling. It caters to customers who want a simple-to-administer VM solution managed by their existing staff, eliminating the need for additional IT specialists.
2. VDI and End-User Computing: HPE GreenLake is ideal for businesses looking for a VDI or end-user computing solution for pilot deployments or production environments. It offers a right-sized solution with optimized resources, including single instancing, deduplication, GPU support, and other automated data services powered by AIOps.
3. Empowering the Edge: Ideal for organizations with remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) that need a unified data management platform for data protection and non-latency-sensitive workloads. It helps eliminate data silos across backup, file/object storage, and archive functions.
4. IT Consolidation, Refresh, and Data Center-in-a-Box: HPE GreenLake simplifies IT consolidation, VM refresh, and overall stack management by reducing the number of components requiring active management.
5. App Modernization and Hybrid Cloud Foundation: This solution empowers businesses to modernize applications and build a strong foundation for an enterprise hybrid cloud environment, perfectly suited for DevSecOps, DevOps, and Test/Dev workflows. It achieves this by seamlessly integrating with both virtual machines (VMs) and containerized applications running on Kubernetes.

Regardless of your business goals, HPE GreenLake provides the tools and resources to streamline cloud operations, improve efficiency, and empower innovation.

Final Thoughts

Integrating private clouds into hybrid environments challenges IT leaders to ensure continuous operation and manage complex workloads. Solutions like HPE Hybrid Cloud and GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition simplify management, guarantee availability, and boost efficiency.

By leveraging HPE GreenLake, organizations maximize private cloud potential, driving innovation and gaining a competitive edge in the digital landscape. WEI, a leading IT solutions provider, can partner with your organization to implement HPE cloud solutions and streamline your infrastructure, paving the way for a smooth modernization journey. Contact us today to unlock your cloud’s full potential.

Next steps: In this free WEI white paper titled, deepen your understanding of AI and the critical role of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in managing extensive datasets and advancing sophisticated machine learning models. This asset touches on:

• AI’s growth challenge
• Growth of AI expenditure
• HPE-as-a-Service with HPE GreenLake

The post Is The Private Cloud Environment Still Relevant In Today’s IT Landscape? appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Businesses constantly pursue strategies to enhance their IT infrastructure and leverage data-driven insights to drive growth and innovation. With the rise of insights-driven enterprises, the importance of unlocking the full potential of business data has become increasingly evident.

As businesses embark on this modernization journey, they face various challenges, particularly in areas such as security and data management. To shed light on these burdens, WEI works alongside industry experts to gain valuable insights on data utilization and cybersecurity to guide customers to meaningful IT modernization.

Understanding Pain Points And Embracing Modernization

In a recent WEI podcast focused on IT infrastructure modernization and its critical role in leveraging business data effectively, experts Matt Leal, Shawn Murphy, and former White House CIO Theresa Payton discuss the practicalities and strategic importance of data modernization.

While the benefits of modernization are undeniable, challenges like cybersecurity loom large. Shawn Murphy, Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at WEI, emphasizes these burdens:

• Expanding Threat Landscape: With cloud computing, remote work, and SaaS services, the attack surface has become much larger and is constantly changing. This makes it harder to pinpoint what needs protection.
• Data Proliferation: The increase in data collection leads to an extensive attack surface. It could overwhelm security teams with information and hinder their ability to analyze it effectively.
• Inability To Stop All Breaches: News reports may highlight some breaches, but the reality is likely much worse. The FBI estimates that in losses. This doesn’t account for unreported breaches or losses like damaged reputation or privacy violations.

“Proactive measures are crucial,” Murphy explains, as WEI focuses its cybersecurity solutions heavily within the prevention phase. He also highlights the importance of developing useful metrics to measure the effectiveness of cybersecurity initiatives.

Additionally, Matt Leal, Presales Solutions Architect at WEI, shares the importance of a holistic solution. “While some industries are more advanced, any organization can progress with the right support. Our customers span various industries. Each has its own challenges, but we provide tailored solutions to overcome them.” Murphy adds that healthcare, for example, has specific data privacy regulations that may hinder cloud adoption. However, partnering with a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) like WEI can help organizations navigate these complexities and accelerate modernization.

Theresa Payton, former White House Chief Information Officer and currently the CEO at , emphasizes the importance of human-centric stories in aligning technology initiatives with business strategies. She believes that understanding the human element is crucial for successful secured digital transformation.

In this context, a strategic and holistic approach to IT modernization takes center stage. Prioritizing robust cybersecurity measures becomes essential to safeguard and enhance business operations.

To connect technology effectively with people, she suggests the following:

• Prioritize The Human Element: Understand who you serve and their needs. Whether it’s employees, customers, or any other user group, identify their goals and challenges.
• Position Technology As A Solution: Instead of merely listing features, explain how technology addresses specific needs and improves the user experience.
• Tailor Your Message: When communicating with executives, frame your message around “secured digital transformation” that supports the human user story.

By keeping the human element at the center and demonstrating how technology serves it, organizations can bridge the gap and ensure that technology empowers the people it’s meant to serve. Understanding your audience and enhancing user experiences are critical steps in achieving organizational goals through advanced solutions.

The Crucial Role of Secure Data Storage

Data-driven insights are now the cornerstone of a successful business strategy. In fact, research shows that enterprises leveraging these insights are . However, complexities mentioned by Murphy can arise from data collection, analysis, and infrastructure management. Trusted partnerships with experienced technology providers, such as the case between HPE and WEI, can be crucial in navigating these hurdles.

Data security should be a paramount concern from the very beginning, meticulously woven into every aspect of the infrastructure, from the initial capture of data all the way through to its disposal. By prioritizing data security throughout the entire process, businesses can ensure they’re building a foundation of trust with their customers and stakeholders.

The concept of “secure by design” aligns with this need. It means cybersecurity is built into technology from the start and seamlessly aligns with business objectives. As we delve into the challenges faced by organizations like yours, our experts also explore the critical security considerations surrounding data storage. Leal reinforces this by pointing out that “modern solutions are often the most secure,” underlining the importance of embracing innovation to combat evolving threats.

One such secure and adaptive modern solution is HPE Alletra. This storage platform is designed for the complexities of the modern IT landscape, functioning as an ally against data breaches. Built on the sturdy foundation of and powered by 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, the Alletra series delivers on performance, scalability, and crucially, security.

By assuming breaches will happen at any time, organizations can build stronger systems. This means having good checks and balances, clear rules for data, and even special techniques to protect it.

While data security is important, Payton argues organizations have a bigger responsibility to protect everyone involved. This means thinking about how data affects people, the risk of breaches, and what they owe those who trust them.

The best companies practice a culture of “care” for data. This ensures it’s always used and stored ethically and responsibly. Organizations need to ask, “Is this data really needed, or are we just collecting it because we can?” A culture of care makes companies consider the ethical side of things too.

Final Thoughts

The key to success in today’s digital world lies in embracing innovation, leveraging data effectively and responsibly, and prioritizing far-left cybersecurity throughout your operations. Navigating modernization isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. WEI can help by offering tailored solutions and expert guidance for businesses, from implementing cutting-edge technologies to developing robust cybersecurity strategies.

Reach out to our experienced team for more insights and assistance on your modernization journey.

Next steps: In a digitally connected hybrid world, security is a shared responsibility. The weakest link can potentially expose everyone connected. That is why HPE has created a vision to make security an inherent part of all operations as it manages more than two million devices and over one exabyte of data through its expansive HPE GreenLake platform.

In this , we identify: 

• Hybrid’s impact on cybersecurity
• HPE’s vision of security
• Siloed vs. shared security
• New approaches to cybersecurity talent
• Creating your own talent pipeline
• Resilience through Zero Trust

Download:

The post How Data Storage and Security Drive IT Modernization appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Picture yourself as the proud owner of a classic car, a vintage beauty you’ve painstakingly restored with a significant investment of resources. It’s more than just a car; it’s a symbol of your dedication. Data, like your classic car, is a business’s most valuable asset. Just as you wouldn’t leave the car exposed to the elements, you need to securely store and protect your organization’s information.

You wouldn’t just throw a tarp over your precious vehicle. You would place it out of the elements, away from opportunists who might see your car as an easy steal. Managing and maintaining mission-critical applications demands that same level of care and protection for your data. This is where HPE Primera comes to the rescue.

Unmatched Data Storage And Performance

When looking for a data storage solution, your enterprise needs to prioritize operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. HPE Primera stands out by offering cloud-like agility, unified data management, and new standards for resiliency and performance in an enterprise storage solution. It possesses a set of features well-suited for the modern data center environment, such as:

1. Extreme Resiliency

HPE Primera provides a 100% Availability Guarantee to ensure your data’s constant accessibility. Think of it like an easy-to-operate and reliable garage for your classic car. With automatic weekly updates and upgrades, downtime is minimal, and your data stays secure and intact.

2. Intelligent Operations

Investing in a vintage car demands a garage capable of proactive issue resolution. HPE Primera, powered by HPE InfoSight, an AI-driven intelligence platform, excels in this regard by resolving storage problems in real-time. This, in turn, reduces workloads and eliminates human errors to ensure continuous data safety.

Additionally, the HPE Primera OS offers advanced data services with simplicity and enhanced resiliency for mission-critical applications. Unlike monolithic operating systems (OS) that pose upgrade risks and necessitate node reboots, HPE Primera utilizes a services-centric OS which allows for independent deployment, upgrading, and restarting of each data service.

3. Timeless And Cost-Efficient Storage

HPE Primera provides guaranteed data reduction ratios at a flat support price, with a technology refresh every three years. This eliminates the need for costly upgrades and ensures businesses benefit from updated data storage technology.

4. Scalable Architecture

HPE Primera’s modular design offers flexibility and customization for modern businesses. It seamlessly scales to meet evolving requirements, just as your garage flexes to store more tools that contribute to maintaining your car collection.

Its container-based architecture offers:

• Streamlined multi-node configurations and provisioning.
• Effective management of both traditional and next-generation applications.

As a result, these guarantee a seamless I/O for predictable performance and low latency.

5. Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

HPE Primera is equipped with the following features to manage and migrate various workloads, including:

• Seamless integration and mobility of mission-critical apps (such as SAP HANA, VMWare, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server) to primary, secondary, and private/public cloud tiers like AWS, Scality, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
• . Businesses can restore data in mere seconds, rather than minutes or hours.

6. Security

HPE Primera prioritizes data privacy and compliance. By default, it encrypts your data and employs tamper-evident security measures to maintain data integrity. This system not only secures your data, but also actively detects and alerts you to any unauthorized access or tampering attempts.

7. Green Storage Solution

HPE Primera is not just a high-performance garage. With its , the appliance operates with minimal carbon footprint and has lower cooling costs than other Tier 0 storage solutions.

Final Thoughts

As the volume of data continues to grow, managing and maintaining mission-critical applications for your business requires high-performing and resilient storage solutions. HPE Primera is a comprehensive service that seamlessly combines cloud storage’s agility with high-end storage system performance and security.

This intelligent choice is perfect for businesses seeking efficient and reliable storage solutions. Whether you require a platform for intensive applications, hybrid cloud capabilities, data privacy, or energy efficiency, HPE Primera has you covered. Contact the storage experts at WEI and take the first step to secure your data and unlock your business’s full potential.

Next steps: In the meantime, download our free tech brief,

The post How HPE Primera’s All-In-One Solution Transforms Your Data Storage Game appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Keeping your data, applications, and services up to date is a challenge made even more complex by cloud migration strategies that spread capacity across multiple on- and off-premise environments. This can make it difficult to ensure you always have enough storage for everything. However, imagine having the ability to manage your data storage effortlessly and securely across all locations with a single, unified console. This tool would not only provision and configure your arrays, but also provide you with the flexibility of choosing pricing models that best suit your company size and budget. This is where comes in. Let’s explore.

Simplifying Data Storage & Infrastructure

HPE Alletra offers a comprehensive data infrastructure solution that enables customers to move from managing and maintaining data storage in-house to accessing it as an on-demand service. With hybrid cloud data protection, users can access their datasets anywhere with maximum agility while maintaining security across multiple environments from edge-to-cloud. This makes the process of storing large amounts of data easier than ever before.

Businesses can transform their data infrastructure with HPE Alletra and free themselves from the hassle of owning, upgrading, and fine-tuning on-premise storage. With this service, you can access data anywhere while without compromising on efficiency – leading to operational time savings.

HPE Alletra storage solutions offer a wide range of options for customers, depending on their specific application and workload requirements. Three array families are available – the 5000 series, 6000 series, and 9000 series – each featuring various drive configurations to ensure maximum performance in any environment. is the latest addition to their portfolio, and revolutionizes data storage with hybrid cloud data protection, giving customers the ultimate capacity and consumption options at competitive prices. With this leading-edge solution, businesses can now store their data more securely while significantly reducing costs. The luxury of accessing and utilizing as you go is becoming more and more commonplace in the consumption model era.

Improving Financial Agility

The HPE Alletra portfolio improves data storage and hybrid cloud data protection with the assistance of . Enterprises can access a flexible as-a-service consumption model that supports overcoming CapEx budget constraints and complex procurement cycles with HPE GreenLake. With guidance from partners like WEI, HPE Alletra makes it even easier for organizations to get the storage resources they need with optimized tiers delivered in just days – providing scalability on-demand as well as buffer capacity for surprise workloads or sudden usage spikes. Businesses get the best of both worlds with these data storage solutions: pay-per-use flexibility or a managed turnkey solution that helps companies free up cash flow while increasing financial agility.

Furthermore, companies can say goodbye to hefty upfront costs and hello to a convenient, monthly subscription with HPE Alletra 5000. Cloud consumption allows you to speed up project deployment times while freeing up both capital and IT resources. By aligning spending with business needs, this system provides financial flexibility as well as improved operational agility.

HPE Strengthens Hybrid Cloud Data Protection

As data becomes more valuable and critical to businesses, the difficulties of backing up, recovering, and managing it are growing. Data growth is accelerating exponentially, which increases pressure on costs while intensifying risk. As IT infrastructures move toward a hybrid cloud model with applications spread over various environments (data centers, private clouds, and public clouds), protecting them has become an increasingly complex task.

is a comprehensive solution designed to protect VMware virtual machines (VMs) across hybrid cloud environments with the convenience of software as a service (SaaS). HPE Alletra customers can benefit from this service as well as local snapshots for fast data restores, on-premise backups for rapid recovery, plus cost effective long-term storage in the cloud.

With HPE Alletra and HPE Backup and Recovery Services, organizations can enjoy peace of mind knowing their valuable information won’t be compromised. HPE’s advanced security solutions protect VMs from potential or malware attacks while offering a cost-effective approach across hybrid clouds.

Learn More About HPE’s Data Storage Offerings

HPE has transformed the way businesses operate, offering cutting-edge cloud solutions that maximize productivity and minimize costs. For more than 20 years, WEI has proudly partnered with HPE to access their latest storage offerings – allowing us to help enterprises gain maximum value from their data infrastructure investments. Get in touch today for more information on how you can manage your data with these powerful data infrastructure solutions.

Next Steps: In a recent WEI study, 52% of IT decision makers indicated plans to invest in upgrades and maintenance of storage solutions in the next two years. Our experts have identified four smart storage strategies to compete in today’s digital world. Download our free tech brief below!

The post Unlock Financial Agility, Data Protection For Your Hybrid Storage Needs appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Enterprises modernizing their IT infrastructure to keep up with the demand of a changing workforce need more from their storage providers. With the work-from-anywhere model here to stay, an enterprise storage solution that offers on-demand, always-on, and easy-to-use services is a must.

As more enterprises move forward with their modernization efforts to support this shift in the workforce, agility is a key requirement of high-end storage. It is clear that the more purpose-built, statically defined scale-up designs of the past need to give way to more software-defined, modular scale-out designs.

Modern enterprises need a high-end storage solution that leverages AI/ML technologies, in combination with automation and continuous availability, to improve and simplify routine management tasks at scale. It is also important to be able to operate in hybrid cloud environments while also delivering a rich, secure storage management operating system.

There is one high-end storage solution that meets all these requirements and more: HPE Primera Intelligent Storage. Keep reading to learn 10 reasons why HPE Primera meets your enterprise’s high-end storage needs.

10 Reasons Why Your Enterprise Needs HPE Primera Intelligent Storage

1. Global Intelligence: With HPE InfoSight embedded into HPE Primera, disruptions are predicted and prevented in real-time to help optimize performance.
2. Services-centric OS: Mission-critical apps benefit from reduced risk and enhanced resiliency with HPE Primera’s simplified and unique OS for high-end storage without node reboots for most updates.
3. 100% availability guarantee: Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, HPE Primera analyzes application patterns while also predicting and preventing disruptions across the infrastructure. The solution also provides business continuity with automatic site failover. With no disruptions, corruptions, or delays using app-aware resiliency across all models, HPE Primera provides a 100% availability guarantee.
4. Timeless storage: This all-inclusive software provides a unique ownership experience with unending value. You won’t pay for additional features and enhancements, and the software will update every three years.
5. Radical simplicity: With HPE Primera, your time spent deploying, managing, and scaling your storage needs is reduced up to 93%. HPE Primera is able to tune itself and implement upgrades without slowing your ability to serve your customers.
6. As-a-service consumption: Using HPE Primera with HPE Greenlake offers you the ability to consume IT on your terms. Get exactly what you need when you need it with its ability to use high-end storage-as-a-service capabilities.
7. Intelligence and composability: HPE Primera’s integration with HPE Synergy advances the cloud experience, providing a foundation of composability for any workload.
8. All-active architecture: Every volume within your storage architecture is able to access every SSD, node, and port, providing nonstop availability and low latency for fast performance at scale.
9. Extreme scalability: HPE Primera has made scaling high-end storage a breeze using multi-node transparent upgrades. Your storage needs are able to grow with the needs of your enterprise, intelligently adjusting to your unique business demands.
10. Hybrid cloud mobility: Extend your protection to the cloud. With less cost and complexity, HPE Primera’s cloud mobility delivers:

• Flash speed
• Application-integrated data protection
• Copy data management
• Data mobility

Seamlessly, securely, and cost-effectively move your enterprise’s data across primary, secondary, and private/public cloud tiers. With a simple cloud-based archive or disaster recovery option, you’re able to use your on-premises infrastructure for fast, reliable operational recovery.

Ready To Redefine Your High-End Storage?

HPE Primera is redefining high-end storage to ensure that modern needs are being met as simply and easily as possible. Problems that plague more traditional storage systems, such as risky upgrades and complex management systems, are fixed through intelligent design to keep enterprises going strong through their modernization efforts. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.

Next Steps: As the title of our refreshed executive brief eludes to, we have identified four smart storage strategies to help your company compete in today’s digital world. Such strategies have already proven to help companies be better prepared for their new normal. Click here to read and download

The post 10 Reasons HPE Primera Meets Your Enterprise High-End Storage Needs appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

How much data is your enterprise creating and what are you doing about it? For most companies, data is being created, and subsequently stored, at faster and faster rates. However, many enterprises lack the tools to properly utilize and take advantage of their data, especially those that are still struggling with just the part of the equation.

As technology has advanced, we’ve moved from storing information on tapes to disks and now, in modern times, the cloud. By utilizing the cloud for data storage and processing, enterprises gain great benefits, but no solution is without its costs.

The main issue comes when the data stored on the cloud needs to be utilized by services on-prem or in the data center. is helping to solve this problem and liberate enterprises from the confines of data siloes with their new Keep reading to learn how this solution is redefining cloud data storage.

Find Freedom In Data Management

While a vast majority of enterprises are utilizing the cloud for some amount of data storage, few have utilized it for critical file data, often citing difficulties in moving it one way or the other. As a result, the data lives separately than the applications that need it, reducing the effectiveness and utilization of this data. To get around this problem, some IT teams have re-built workflows to use data while it’s in the cloud, but this comes with its own set of problems.

The bottom line is there hasn’t been a simple solution to solve these cloud data storage and utilization issues… Until now.

Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3 allows IT teams to fluidly move data to and from Amazon S3 with just a few clicks, simplifying the cloud storage process and streamlining interactions with other Amazon Web Services as well.

“I like to think of [Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3] as the easiest way for customers to put their file data to work with all the amazing marketplace apps and cloud native services on AWS,” said Qumulo Technical Marketing Manager David Sniderman, with ESG Senior Analyst Scott Sinclair. “Our file system is designed to help users take advantage of the cloud’s scalable infrastructure for high performance data processing and content creation. Shift lets customers take that data, wherever they create it, and use it with AWS Cloud Service.”

With Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3, Qumulo customers, whether cloud native or creating data on prem, can take that valuable file data and use it with Amazon’s full suite of cloud services.

Why Enterprises Choose Qumulo Shift For Amazon S3

In addition to this simplified data management, enterprises will experience a variety of other benefits, including:

• Improved data availability for your users, wherever they might be located. In a time when many businesses are utilizing remote or , this is a benefit that cannot be overestimated.
• Realtime visibility and control over data and users. Potential issues can be found quicker and any decisions that must be made regarding the management of data will benefit from a full and accurate picture of the current data environment.
• Better data reliability and protection. Thanks to Qumulo’s distributed file system, which aggregates and protects cloud storage, enterprises never have to worry about files lost in the cloud. Secondary copies of data are created by native replication, which adds an additional layer of data protection.
• Lowered total cost of ownership (TCO). In comparison to legacy solutions, Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3 costs less and offers a higher percentage of provisioned capacity.
• Flexibility. Qumulo offers a flexible deployment model, allowing enterprises to create the environment that best suits their performance and capacity needs.

At the heart of it, is making it easier for enterprises to keep their data next to their applications, allowing it to be utilized to meet business objectives.

Are You Interested In Qumulo Shift For Amazon S3?

As a leader in data management, Qumulo is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major film and animation studios, and some of the largest research facilities around the world. From building smart cars, to vital disease research, enterprises around the world are changing the way they store and utilize data thanks to Qumulo. Our team has experience implementing Qumulo for enterprise companies that process and analyze vast amounts of mission-critical data across several industries. today to learn more about how Qumulo can quickly add value to your data storage environment and strategy.

NEXT STEPS: Check out our latest infographic which shares 7 ways Qumulo is making cloud data storage radically simple. PLUS it includes a case study example of how one of our customers found success leveraging Qumulo with AWS. Click below to learn more.

The post How Qumulo Shift For Amazon S3 Can Revolutionize Your Data Storage appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

It’s no secret that HPE has been on the forefront of storage innovation for some time. Even with that knowledge, HPE’s is still an exciting moment for IT leaders everywhere.

In this article, we’ll break down the most important points of HPE’s recent announcements and new offerings, as well as how they can help you leverage your data to make decisions that will drive your business forward.

What Are The Specific Problems HPE Is Trying To Solve?

To really understand HPE’s goals with their new storage offerings, it’s important to have a clear idea of the specific data storage problems they set out to solve when designing them.

First and foremost is the amount of data that organizations are faced with. New digital efforts have resulted in more data than ever before, and with increased cyber threats, as well as rising expectations to utilize data, enterprises are left with a very complex situation that requires manual management for many IT organizations. , this complexity “creates risk and comes at a cost to innovation and time-to-market.”

For those organizations that have transformed their data storage to reduce the burden on IT through artificial intelligence (AI), self-service, policy-based automation or other strategies, the problem of complexity still remains.

This complexity is exactly the challenge HPE has tackled with their latest cloud-native storage offerings, which aim to streamline operations and provide simplicity for .

The latest in As-A-Service: HPE’s New Cloud Console

The new is a SaaS-based console that delivers unified data operations as a service, drastically reducing the need for manual data and infrastructure management.

When designing the console, , “a unique, cloud-native architecture, shared with the Aruba Edge Services Platform, and is designed to abstract and control infrastructure and data workflows across the data lifecycle and infrastructure lifecycle from edge-to-cloud.”

By utilizing as its technological foundation, the console ensures enterprises experience the secure management experience of on-premises environments, but with the agility of the cloud.

The Data Services Cloud Console is also helping organizations focus less on managing their data and more on utilizing it to their advantage by speeding app development and deployment, eliminating data silos, and offering the cloud experience regardless of the location of the data.

Maintain Data Infrastructure With HPE Cloud Data Services

Through this suite of software subscription services, data administrators can simplify and automate data infrastructure management, regardless of the location or scale of the data.

Among its other benefits, these subscription services will:

• Enable self-service
• Offer on-demand provisioning
• Eliminate guesswork
• Allow enterprises to optimize service level objectives

Master Edge-To-Cloud With HPE Alletra

With all of their new storage offerings, HPE is simplifying and reducing the need for manual management of data, and is no exception.

is a portfolio of cloud-native data infrastructure solutions that can support data no matter where it lives, from edge-to-cloud. Powered by the aforementioned Data Services Console, HPE Alletra is also delivered as-a-service, helping enterprises stay financially flexible.

Best of all, the portfolio has been built with today’s diverse application and infrastructure needs in mind, delivering the architectural flexibility enterprises need, without the added complexity of legacy data infrastructure.

HPE Is Changing The Storage Game

With these innovations, it’s clear that HPE is committed to helping customers leverage their data to make decisions that propel businesses forward.

Other advancements in their storage solutions over the past few years, including HPE Infosight, and now these new storage-as-a-service offerings, give enterprises a way to finally conquer the data management problem and get out from underneath the mountains of data that today’s digital world creates.

Questions about HPE’s New Storage Offerings?

As a global, edge-to-cloud company, HPE is helping enterprises implement solutions that improve productivity and reduce costs through cloud solutions. Here at WEI we get access to new HPE offerings thanks to our Platinum Partner status so we can fully understand how these solutions will benefit our customers. Contact WEI today to start a discussion about HPE’s game-changing storage announcements.

NEXT STEPS: Spend less time managing infrastructure and more time focused on the projects that matter most. Find out how HPE’s Intelligent Data Platform powered by HPE InfoSight can keep you in the know about infrastructure performance and how it can proactively heal and patch problems before you even know they exist! Read our tech brief below for more information.

The post Why HPE’s New Storage Offerings Matter To You appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

One of the greatest challenges faced by today’s enterprises is managing their ever-increasing volumes of data. Over time, the volume, location and importance of data have all evolved, and legacy solutions can no longer keep up.

Enterprises need a solution that can offer the support for not only the volume of data, but also differing file types, data locations, applications, and workloads. To meet this need, Qumulo has built a that directly fulfills the data-related needs of today’s enterprises.

In this two-part series, we are discussing the top 8 reasons should be a part of your cloud strategy. Check out part one for the first four ways that Qumulo is helping enterprises manage data.

5. Qumulo is a leader in data storage

Beyond the many customer reviews and testimonials in favor of the solution, Qumulo has also been recognized as a leader for the third year in a row in the .

by 2024, “large enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object storage on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, compared to 2020.”

For this and many other reasons, it’s more important than ever for enterprises to take charge of the way their data is handled, stored, and utilized.

6. Immense return on investment

Data management is often a time and resource sink, with many hours of administration needed from IT to properly secure and store it. For this reason alone, brings customers immense ROI just by reducing the amount of time typically needed by IT to administer the data platform.

Because Qumulo is programmable and infinitely scalable, Qumulo lets customers take advantage of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to move data as needed, making sure your applications and users have access whenever they need it.

Additionally, as helps enterprises simplify data management, customers will find that in addition to cost and time savings, the enterprise will be able to better utilize data to direct and improve business objectives.

7. Qumulo provides freedom of choice

When it comes to cloud computing, enterprises rarely utilize just one cloud platform. Qumulo supports this by offering customers the and the ability to choose environments on public cloud, in the data center, or at the edge.

File data can be integrated with any application on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and customers are not locked in with one specific vendor or infrastructure.

8. Qumulo lowers operational costs

In addition to the massive return on investment that Qumulo offers to customers, it also lowers operational costs in general. Data storage costs are lowered as customers use the full capacity of their storage, and there is no penalty for small files. This means that customers utilizing Qumulo in their data center will have more storage and less cost per-rack.

Other cost savings come from reduced staff time for data management and reduced hardware maintenance costs, as well as cost-effective performance supported by AI and machine learning.

Qumulo is revolutionizing data management

When building , Qumulo zeroed in on exactly what challenges IT professionals face when it comes to data management and set out to address them. With this customer-first approach, Qumulo is changing the data management game and transforming the way enterprises view data.

With the smarter data management provided by Qumulo, enterprises can see in real time what is happening with their data and make better business decisions. Should problems arise, the platform offers the visibility IT teams need to diagnose and fix them, instead of just buying more storage as a stop gap solution.

Are you interested in Qumulo?

As a leader in data management, Qumulo has helped enterprises around the globe manage over 200 billion files. From building smart cars, to vital disease research, enterprises around the world are changing the way they store and utilize data thanks to Qumulo.

This blog post is part of a 2-part series about the benefits of leveraging Qumulo for enterprise data management. If you missed the first post, click here to read part one.

NEXT STEPS: Continue reading about Qumulo in our tech brief below to learn how Qumulo is enabling high performance productivity across distributed enterprises and remote workforces.

The post 8 Reasons Qumulo Should Be Part Of Your Cloud Strategy, Part 2 appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

When it comes to challenges faced by today’s IT organizations, there are few as universal as data management. In the last two decades, the volume of data that enterprises are expected to utilize, secure, and manage has increased exponentially. The location of that data has also changed, with much of it moving to the cloud or hybrid environments.

Raising the stakes even further, the value of data has increased as well. An enterprise that isn’t making use of the data it has, isn’t securing it properly, or isn’t ensuring users have access to the data they need to be productive will fail.

To stay on top of this constant flow of data, enterprises require a solution that can offer the support for not only the volume of data, but also differing file types, data locations, applications, and workloads.

In this two-part series, we’ll discuss the top 8 reasons should be a part of your cloud strategy. This first article will share our first four reasons. (Read part 2 here.)

1. Qumulo simplifies management of enterprise data

Complexity is a major factor in the amount of time and resources IT must dedicate to data management. When it comes to managing cloud data, which may exist in a combination of private and public clouds, it gets even worse.

With Qumulo, enterprises gain a unified data management experience across on-premises, private, and public environments, offering , regardless of scale.

Several key features, including the ability to migrate applications to the cloud without rewriting/refactoring, the ability to automate DevOps workflows with advanced API, and a quick and easy setup process, all contribute to this simplicity.

Enterprises who make the switch will immediately see and experience the time and cost benefits of Qumulo’s simple management system.

2. Manage the full data lifecycle

To fully take advantage of the data collected by the enterprise, it can’t be inert. Data has its own lifecycle and through Qumulo, enterprises can manage each stage of it.

The cycle, , is as follows:

• Capture – The data is first captured by the enterprise
• Interact – The data begins to be interacted with by users at the enterprise
• Transform – The data is utilized and transformed for use by the enterprise
• Publish – The data is published for consumption by the enterprises target audience
• Archive – After running its initial course, the data is archived for later use or reference

With Qumulo, enterprises can manage data throughout its lifecycle with a single solution, giving IT unparalleled visibility across the enterprise and making it easy to find and catalogue individual pieces of data as necessary.

3. Proven in every industry

Data management is a problem for every enterprise, regardless of scale or industry, and Qumulo can assist with them all.

Whether your enterprise is in healthcare, media and entertainment, manufacturing, or anything in between, Qumulo can provide the cloud data management solution you need to be successful.

4. Qumulo has a broad range of use cases

Just as Qumulo can provide for enterprises in every industry, it also has a broad range of use cases.

Beyond just helping enterprises manage business data, Qumulo has a wide range of use cases from helping customers analyze data to develop new technologies, to providing support for video surveillance systems responsible for student safety, to supporting aerial imaging that is key to disaster response.

More than just data management

As detailed above, . By engaging with Qumulo, you can finally tap into the true potential of the data you collect and utilize it to not only inform your strategic decisions, but completely transform the way you do business.

Stay tuned for part two of this article series where we will discuss the next four reasons Qumulo should be part of your cloud strategy.

Are you interested in Qumulo?

As a leader in , Qumulo is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major film and animation studios, and some of the largest research facilities around the world. From building smart cars, to vital disease research, enterprises around the world are changing the way they store and utilize data thanks to Qumulo.

This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series about the benefits of leveraging Qumulo for enterprise data management. Continue on to part 2 here >>

NEXT STEPS: Learn 7 ways Qumulo can meet your data needs as you grow and scale in our tech brief below, “Critical Data Storage for a Distributed Enterprise.”

The post 8 Reasons Qumulo Should Be Part Of Your Cloud Strategy, Part 1 appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Change is inevitable but, for the IT industry in recent years, it’s been nothing short of significant and disruptive. The era of big data is providing enterprises significant opportunities to make better-informed business decision by leveraging analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies.

Businesses who take advantage of this to respond quickly to evolving market demands are finding success, as long as their underlying IT infrastructures are transformed into something agile enough to keep up. This agility often means a significant departure from legacy storage and movement towards all-flash arrays, software-defined storage, and converged infrastructure. The availability of cloud-based services in particular is driving change: creating expectations about deployment, making it easier to securely share data across different constituencies, and introducing IT to new ways of thinking about easy scalability, frequent and nondisruptive upgrades, and technology refresh for IT infrastructure in general.

But there’s A downside

These high-end enterprise storage system scale to millions of IOPS and petabytes of capacity, deliver “six-nines” of availability, and offer a full complement of storage management or “data” services that enable dense mixed workload consolidation while still meeting individual application requirements. But despite the advantages, there are still a number of challenges to overcome:

• Don’t address application service availability. Even if a is 100 percent available, that doesn’t necessarily translate into application service availability. Storage causes 9.8 percent of the downtime in a typical datacenter, which means IT needs visibility into the other layers in the stack that deliver the application services and, when administrators use multiple tools to accurate diagnose and remediate these issues, they present more complex challenges and take longer to resolve.
• Designed for experts. The other side of the management flexibility coin is complexity. These systems often require very sophisticated storage management expertise for installation, configuring, and managing them to meet business objectives. Unfortunately, with storage management tasks moving away from dedicated administration teams and toward IT generalists, the knowledge can be lacking.
• Require constant tuning to address “noisy neighbor” concerns. Application changes, which happen on a regular basis, raise concerns about the ability to predictably meet performance requirements across a set of If systems do not offer sufficient capabilities to meet service-level agreements, then manual tuning is required to rebalance the system configuration – a time consuming process that requires sophisticated knowledge many administrators managing storage today don’t have.
• Impose disruptive, time-consuming, or risky upgrades. Technology upgrades to these systems can be disruptive, time consuming and fraught with risk. Moving to the next technology generation still generally requires a forklift upgrade, manual data migration, and incremental upgrades to firmware. Pre-validating and forecasting the “impact” of these types of upgrades depends on human involvement – both of which add time and risk.
• Have outdated technology “baggage.” System architectures originally designed during the hard disk drive era will not necessarily support the massive parallelization necessary to optimize the performance and capacity utilization of the solid state media that has already come to dominate high-end system shipments, and this factor can hinder workload consolidation and limit a system’s ability to deliver predictably consistent performance.

A new way to look at high-end storage

Keeping in mind that agility is the key requirement for today’s digitally transforming enterprises, the design of high-end storage systems needs to change. The more purpose-built, statically defined scale-up designs of the past need to give way to more software-defined, modular scale-out designs. Systems that were originally designed and optimized assuming the use of HDDs need to be optimized to take advantage of the latest solid state storage technologies (NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics).

These systems need to leverage AI/ML technologies, in combination with big data analytics and automation, to improve and simplify routine management tasks at the scale of today’s computing environments. They also need to be designed to operate in hybrid cloud environments, since this is clearly the blueprint for how IT infrastructure will be deployed going forward. And they need to offer all this while continuing to deliver the rich storage management functionality that enables secure, multitenant management from a proven storage OS that can scale to millions of IOPS, petabytes of capacity, and “six-nines plus” availability.

Reset the definition of high-end enterprise storage With HPE Primera

HPE offers significant choices to its customers in terms of deployment models for storage, delivering storage appliances; software-only, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI); converged infrastructure; and cloud-based services in a storage portfolio that includes primary and secondary storage; block-, file-, and object-based platforms; scale-up and scale-out architectures; and the industry’s most mature cloud-based predictive analytics platform (InfoSight).

In introducing its new high-end storage system, HPE Primera, HPE is melding the simplicity of Nimble Storage, the mission-critical heritage of 3PAR, and the intelligence of InfoSight into a single high-performance, highly available, and highly scalable large enterprise storage solution. HPE has designed a new system architecture around a number of new features and technologies to provide a platform that delivers management simplicity without compromising its ability to support an enterprise’s most mission-critical workloads:

• Scale-out architecture to support massive parallelism. As a storage protocol technology, NVMe supports at least three orders of magnitude higher parallelism that SCSI. HPE Primera embraces this with a design that his highly optimized for solid state storage.
• A modular, service-centric design for the storage OS. The HPE Primera storage OS is not a monolithic software platform. It is instead built around a service-centric design that allows any feature to be added or modified without requiring a recompile of the entire OS.
• AI/ML-driven self-optimizing systems management. HPE Primera features very comprehensive and granular monitoring, with all the collected data immediately uploaded to HPE InfoSight. HPE InfoSight uses AI/ML to evaluate system performance, capacity utilization, energy consumption, and other metrics and combines that data with data collected from servers, networks, virtual machines, storage infrastructure software, applications, and cloud storage to generate a global view of a system or workload state at any point in time. This global view provides a better overall opportunity to optimize to specific objectives and/or troubleshoot infrastructure issues.
• Streamlined multinode hardware design. Internode communication requires no separate cables, all nodes plug into a passive backplane for much simpler configuration and higher reliability. The HPE Primera node-level building block is a high-density design that can house up to 1PB of effective capacity in 2U (or 2PB in 4U), with additional external storage capacity expansion available in both form factors. This building block node is designed as the hardware foundation for storage systems that can deliver 100% availability. In fact, as part of the HPE Primera announcement, HPE introduced a 100% availability guarantee on every single Primera system that does not require stretch cluster configurations or even a maintenance contract.

Ready for high-end enterprise storage? Give WEI a call.

HPE is the first established enterprise storage vendor to leverage these technologies to this extent, and has done so in a way that will set a new customer experience bar for high-end storage. Their design approach will drive significant value for customers, and more enterprise storage vendors are expected to move in the same direction with their solutions over the next few years. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.

The post Reset Your Expectations for High-End Storage With HPE Primera appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

WEI often works with clients in both areas of backup and disaster recovery at the same time. We find it’s often beneficial for them to be part of a single strategy since the function of backup and DR relates so closely together (recovering from some sort of event). They do have slightly different goals, however. With backup, you might be looking at a smaller data loss, such as accidental deletion or corruption of files.

With DR, you might be looking at a wider event, such as the loss of a facility, or loss of systems. Considering both backup and DR together as one strategy is helpful because it influences where you place data, where you place your disaster recovery location, and how much it costs to achieve the results you want (in both CapEx and OpEx). Both sides of backup and DR should be factored together. They may ultimately be part of one comprehensive solution.

Let’s take a look at a few common scenarios you should factor in to your backup strategy.

Backup Scenario #1: File Restores

It should come as no surprise that the most frequent restore need comes from users wanting to restore individual files. Most of the time, people have to recover from human-error events. They may have to recover a deleted file, a deleted database or an accidentally deleted email. These tend to require the backup administrator to go back in time no later than 7 days to retrieve and restore an earlier version of the file from the backup set. More commonly, we see people needing to go back to yesterday, last night or the backup from two hours ago. Having to go back later than a week, two weeks or even six months is more often a rare occurrence.

In these cases, only storing a few days’ worth of backups on local storage often covers this type of failure scenario. If your organization stores these types of backups in the cloud and gets requests for earlier than seven days ago, you may need to build in more cost to restore. Not only can this type of cloud-based restore cost you more money, it may also take you longer.

Backup Scenario #2: Server Corruption

If a server becomes corrupted, many clients tell us, “Well, we’re just going to fail over to DR.” Many don’t realize all of the implications of doing that. For example, many customers’ networks are not set up to fail an individual component or an individual server from one location to the other. Some major network changes have to happen first when a server fails from one site to another. It does no good if the server comes up in your DR site but nobody can get to it because the network isn’t configured.

A client may tell us they are really concerned about recovering quickly from server corruption, a server crash, or a ransomware attack like CryptoLocker. Based on that concern, it can change how we architect backup and DR. We may opt to have client backups sitting on fast storage so that recovery can be fast and easy. In this case, though, we may also recommend storing those backups for only 2-3 days in order to reduce the cost on that type of storage. Then, after that first few days, we may recommend tiering the backup data. This can involve sending the backups to another storage tier that stores them for 30 days.

This type of scenario might involve a holistic and hybrid backup solution that involves more than one vendor. Rarely do we find one vendor who meets all of a company’s backup or DR requirements in one solution.

Sample Scenario #3: Virtual Server Environments

This scenario also dovetails with Scenario #2. This is because so many server environments are now virtualized. The proliferation of virtual server environments brings with it new opportunities to streamline and improve backup and DR operations. Unfortunately, this proliferation also brings with it new risks: Multiple virtual server environments may now exist on a single physical server. If something happens to that physical server, its downtime impact may be much more far-reaching.

Depending on the individual recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for each virtual server environment, WEI may recommend replicating some servers offsite to a cloud provider, while other data is handled differently. There are also newer technologies that handle virtual environments differently than traditional backup applications that were built for the physical world. Some of these methodologies may make sense, like the use of virtual machine full image backups that no longer require individual backups or backup agents for each virtual server.

Protecting business data is always #1

If you’re using laptops, PCs, or cloud software to share and store critical data, this could cause problems on two fronts. First, in today’s workplace, employees expect 24/7 access to files and data from any location and on any device. If you’re not providing this capability, well-meaning employees often resort to “shadow IT” to maintain productivity. But if these are outside the control of IT, they leave files open to attack, and your business open to liability. Second, it’s not a matter of if devices will crash or get lost or stolen, but when. And while it can be challenging to make sure that everything is backed up and you’re ready for disaster, it’s also absolutely critical. If data loss could put you out of business for a few hours, or a few days, it’s time to consider a better solution.

with Windows Server and Microsoft Azure Cloud Services provide two use-case options. Configurations optimized for file data provide a central repository for files and data with fast performance so employees can collaborate more easily and securely. Configurations optimized for backup and disaster recovery help minimize downtime by protecting data and making it fast and easy to recover when disaster strikes. Both offer edge-to-cloud computing solutions with the ability to extend your on-premises solution with flexible, secure hybrid cloud options.

Luckily, HPE’s solutions for file and backup are simple to deploy, manage, and support. They’re a one-stop shop for packaged solutions including HPE ProLiant servers, storage, software, services, and top-selling options, all tested, optimized, and validated with Windows Server and Azure Cloud Services. They are based on HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers that are equipped to meet the needs of midsize businesses. They are ideal for the midsized enterprise in that they are equipped with sufficient CPU, memory, and storage resources to enable the server to be used for file and print, backup and recovery, and hybrid file and backup.

Next Steps: Learn more about how to effectively plan for hybrid backup strategies in our white paper below.

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We all make mistakes. Some of them have consequences that are more lasting than others are. When it comes to choosing a data storage solution, you can make many common scale-out mistakes. These mistakes can turn your new data storage infrastructure into the gift that keeps on giving. One of the biggest challenges when purchasing data storage is predicting how much storage capacity you really need. It is the most fundamental of considerations. Failing to account for future data growth will leave you scrambling to purchase additional storage sooner than you want to. However, it is just as detrimental to pay for more storage than you need in the near term, especially if that extra space is never used. Overpaying for storage today ties up capital that can be better utilized investing in current opportunities that can return value to your organization.

Scale-up vs Scale-out storage

One of the reasons that people make the mistake of paying for far more storage than they need is that they do not understand the difference between scale-up and scale-out storage. Most IT admins are familiar with the concept of scale-up storage even if they do not recognize the term. Also referred to as vertical scaling, it has served as the traditional architecture for block and file storage platforms. The typical system consists of a pair of redundant controllers that manage multiple shelves of disks. As your storage needs grow, you simply purchase more shelves. The concept sounds simple. While purchasing additional shelves does provide access to new disk technology and price efficiencies, your I/O performance remains throttled by the technology and resources of the stagnant controllers. And there is the fact there is a hard limit to how many shelves the controllers can manage. Once that shelf threshold is reached, you must purchase a new complete controller/shelf package. Then, there comes the day when you must upgrade the system. That is when you bring in the forklift and migrate all of your data to the newer system.

Scale-out storage is known as horizontal scaling and utilizes network-attached storage architecture. Rather than utilizing a series of controller-based shelves, scale-out storage consists of a series of interdependent appliances with each one serving as a complete system by itself. At the same time, you can configure these modules to act as a single cluster. Much like , you can add additional storage appliances like Lego blocks. Capacity of the cluster is automatically then expanded and new data is distributed. There is no need for separate controllers however as all of the required resources reside in the module itself. This means you get more than just added capacity. Additional RAM, CPU and networking resources can be leveraged to improve overall performance of the cluster.

Dell EMC Isilon

If the concept of scale-out storage sounds interesting, then you should become familiar with Dell EMC Storage. That is because according to IDC, Dell EMC Isilon is the industry’s #1 family of network-attached storage systems according to IDC in 2019. Some of the available choice in the Isilon family include the following:

• For those who want the high performance of an all flash array (AFA) there are the Isilon F800 and F810 models that feature up to 250K IOPS and up to 924 TB capacity per chassis
• Those who want the agility of a hybrid architecture will want to learn more about the Isilon H series that offers both SSD and SATA drives within a dense chassis design that can save you 75 percent in rack space
• For those seeking an archiving solution there is the Isilon A200 and A2000 units that are designed to safeguard data with encryption, data protection and efficiency at a lower cost

The right storage solution

Dell EMC has other storage architectures as well. If the need for speed is imperative, then Dell’s SCM persistent storage class memory line of primary storage solutions may be perfect. The PowerMax 8000 holds the title of the fastest storage array and delivers end-to-end NVMe storage class memory. It features 4 PB of effective storage capacity and a blazing 350GB per second bandwidth. For those seeking a simple next generation midrange storage solution there is the Dell EMC Unity XT family, built from the ground up to deliver unified storage speed and efficiency. Next generation means that it is built for a multi-cloud world and comes in both AFA and . In fact, Dell has a solution for just about every storage need, of any organization. What’s more, has solutions specifically designed for industries such as healthcare and media as well as defined workloads such as SAP and AI.

Connections Matter

Your data storage arrays do not work in isolation however. Your arrays can have the fastest I/O speeds available but without the equitable network infrastructure connecting them, your system cannot achieve optimum performance. It is a common mistake. Cheap connections can breed performance problems. If you currently depend on SANs for your storage needs, then consider the line of Directors and Switches. Connectrix directors and switches are designed to bring the best performance and scalability to your storage networks. Ensure high availability and support for Fibre Channel, FICON, FCiP and NVMe over Fabrics.

How WEI can help

Dell EMC has the storage solution to accommodate nearly any data strategy. Chances are that data strategy has changed quite a bit over the years and it may be time to revisit that strategy. Talk to the WEI data storage experts to ensure your data strategy and its supporting architecture will help drive your desired business outcomes. Storage can be complicated, confusing, and costly without the right strategy in place.

NEXT STEPS: Learn about these six scale-out storage mistakes to avoid in our video below.

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The driver that wins the big race does not get as much credit for the win if he simply drove the fastest car on the track. After all, logic says the driver should win. A recent trend in data storage has been to migrate to all flash array storage solutions. Flash drives are certainly faster than HDD disks. For those enterprises that implement AFA storage arrays, performance is definitely fast, which it should be using the logic of the fastest racecar. However, there are companies that are achieving ultrafast performance without having to pay the premium price for high performance storage media. Now that is real innovation.

The high cost of Flash Storage

While SDD may be the fastest disk on the street, it does not make AFA a best alternative. Just as the fastest car on the track is also most likely the most expensive one, AFA storage solutions are costly. A single SSD disk is more than an HDD. The price differential for a single disk may be negligible, but the more storage you need, the more that price differential multiplies. Now imagine if your organization utilizes 100 petabytes of data. Suddenly that price differential is spiraling upwards in the same exponential fashion as your . Despite its costliness, many storage vendors are introducing AFA solutions as the easy way to increase the turbo performance to your storage.

Not all data is equal

This does not mean that SSD is not a viable solution. You certainly have some data that you can justify the need for flash storage. However, that is key term, “some”. Every company has a data profile that emulates a triangle. The small share of data that justifies high-value high-performance resides at the top. The wide base of the triangle represents the majority of your data that consists of lesser value. It can also tolerate greater latency. This is why despite the appeal of performance, AFA solutions still only account for 15 percent of the total footprint of external storage capacity sold today.

Do not confuse speed with innovation

Storage innovation equates to more than just speed, and hardware innovation is not the only approach to deliver it. Infinidat is proof of this. In fact, Gartner names Infinidat as a leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. Gartner does not designate you a leader just because you have the fastest hardware. They do so because you deliver innovation on multiple fronts. Infinidat set about to create a solution specifically designed for petabyte storage environments, one that does more than just store bits and bytes, but provides a competitive edge for petabyte enterprise environments. The result was the creation of an entirely new approach to building and scaling storage infrastructure called the array.

What Infinidat delivers

Infinibox utilizes hybrid architecture that incorporates HDD disks as well as an allotment of SSD drives to deliver the right mix of media storage. Don’t associate the integration of HDD with decreased performance however. In fact, Infinibox is faster than AFA storage. How is this possible? Through innovative design that incorporates DRAM caching as well a machine learning algorithm called Neural Cache that uses I/O history to recognize data correlations in data access patterns in order to optimize future performance.

Infinibox delivers more than just high throughput and microsecond latency. Its single 42U rack provides over 8PB of effective storage capacity. Infinibox maximizes disk utilization through highly efficient thin provisioning, continuous space reclamation, space-efficient snapshots and inline data compression. Those enterprises that require more even more capacity but have unpredictable future growth can take advantage of Infinidat’s flexible consumption option called (COD). With COD, companies only pay for the storage presented to their storage and applications. When more storage is needed, they simply pay for it to have added capacity unveiled.

Infinidat created Infinibox from the ground up for high availability and reliability. It’s self-healing architecture incorporates a hardware redundancy design of (n+2) that helps enable rapid recovery form any component failure. Its resilient design can withstand the failure of up to 12 drives and provide reliability at a level of seven nines.

Security is another aspect in which Infinidat separates itself from AFA solutions. Encryption and traditional approaches to data reduction by nature do not coexist for AFA designs. Infinidat overcomes this challenge by incorporating a approach towards encryption. Thanks to 30 years of collective innovation, Infinibox is able to deliver reduced TCO objectives for both encrypted and non-encrypted data.

Economics at petabyte scale

Large companies are always trying to leverage their inherent economies of scale to their own advantage. Infinibox allows companies to unify their data center-scale pools of storage to overcome the conflicting desires of faster and less expensive performance. With a power load of only 4 watts per usable terabyte, Infinidat customers can quickly garner significant power savings in addition to reduced disk media costs. Savings is also achieved by consolidating the storage footprint through data reduction. When you add it all up, it is no wonder that CFOs as well as CIOs are embracing Infinidat to help them build competitive advantages by attaining superior data services while coinciding realizing substantial cost savings in operational costs. For petabyte enterprise environments, you no longer have to scale your budgets in the same exponential fashion as your data capacity growth. With Infinidat, you can be the first to cross the finish line, without breaking the bank.

NEXT STEPS: Find out why CIOs and CFOs love Infinidat in this video.

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Some purchases require more planning than others do. This is certainly true when it comes to investing in a data storage solution. While applications may come and go, your company’s data lives on. Your data drives the majority of your business operations. One can argue that outside of your Internet gateway, no other facet of the data center has a greater impact on business operations and workloads.

As a result, your storage infrastructure serves as a functional foundation for your business and choosing a data infrastructure solution requires greater diligence than other enterprise components. Just as there are best practices to implementing a data storage solution, there are best practices when it comes to purchasing one as well. We’ve compiled a few dos and don’ts concerning the enterprise storage purchasing process.

Do buy for tomorrow and not today

There are some things you buy to fill an immediate need. Data storage is not one of them. Just as smart homebuyers purchase a first home that will accommodate the needs of a growing family, data storage is a long-term acquisition. You are buying into the future. A by IDC shows that the amount of data residing in the world today doubles every two years. Though that dramatic growth rate may not be indicative of your own environment, it is a universal truth that your organization will create and ingest more data a year from now. Failure to overlook future data growth has definite repercussions. The purchasing process is too elongated and migrations can be too involved and costly to repeat it all again in a couple of years.

Don’t underestimate data growth

If you are going to buy for tomorrow, you need to know what tomorrow looks like. Most of your company’s data is created outside of the IT department. Make it a point to meet with department heads throughout your company to learn about their needs. Their anticipated application deployments will increase data expansion. Meet with senior executives to discuss possible acquisitions or mergers as events such as these can exponentially escalate storage needs overnight.

Do think about your storage environment as a whole

Your data center is a collective assembly of infrastructure nodes and technologies. You cannot optimize server workloads by only considering RAM and CPU allotment. The same applies to storage. Your storage arrays are not islands. Your storage array may have the fastest IOPs but its surrounding infrastructure environment can undermine its performance potential. Make sure you have the right networking strategy to take advantage of high performance storage across your entire enterprise.

Don’t just compare storage size

While careful consideration of future data growth is an essential step, storage availability goes beyond the mere presence of physical storage space. Modern day storage solutions incorporate a number of data reduction technologies to maximize available space such as thin provisioning, compression and deduplication. Make sure you understand these supplemental technologies and understand that different vendors use different equation sets to arrive at their incremental savings targets. Data reduction methodologies can also reduce your overall storage footprint. equates to lower costs concerning space, power and cooling.

Do compare apples to apples

Data storage is a lot more complicated than it was a decade ago. Make sure you understand the difference between HDD and SSD technology. HDD is cheaper but requires more power to spin the disks. Solid-state drives are much faster and have less moving parts; however, not all of your data will justify the initial cost. There is also hybrid storage that incorporates both types. Make sure you understand the ratio of HHD and SSD and the role that SSD will play.

Don’t let initial pricing restrict your options

We all know that price should never be the sole driving factor for something as important as your storage infrastructure, yet it is an easy trap due to the high cost of storage. CAPEX however, is not the only involved cost for today’s modern data storage solutions. You consider long term operational and support costs as well. Savings initiated from data reduction technologies, drive consolidation and management efficiencies all help to reduce the TCO of modern . Some vendors also offer leasing options as well as flex capacity options in which you only pay for the storage you currently use.

Do plan for long purchasing and education cycles

If you have not kept track of data storage innovation since your last purchase, there is going to be a learning curve to catch up. Common best practices within the data storage industry have changed a lot in the past five years. Chances are that any assumptions made during your last product cycle are outdated today. It is about more than just file or block storage today. Begin the preliminary stages of your next product cycle early enough to educate yourself. Taking the time to speak with your peers about their own experiences will pay off. You can also speak with the storage experts at WEI who will take the time to understand the future needs of your environment to help construct a strategy for you.

Do consider Dell Storage Solutions and WEI

There are many options available today when it comes to storage, and you need a vendor that provides many types of solutions. The portfolio of storage solutions available from Dell Technologies can help you unlock the value of your data. for nearly every conceivable environment:

• Primary storage solutions designed to accelerate your critical workloads from core to edge to cloud
• Managed control of your unstructured data by efficiently consolidating wide ranges of file and object storage at any scale
• Automated management and AI help attain greater efficiencies, performance and reliability
• Data solutions specifically designed for specific environments such as SAP or cloud services
• Data solutions that meet the unique needs of given industries such as healthcare or multimedia

Dell manufactures the solutions, and WEI customizes them to the varying needs of our customers. WEI is a premier technology partner that is also passionate about storage and solving technology problems for our customers. Let WEI educate you about your storage options in order to liberate the value and innovation that lies within your residing data.

NEXT STEPS: Explore more Dos and Don’ts of Enterprise Storage decisions.
Over the years WEI’s storage experts have seen it ALL! Find out what we’ve learned about storage strategies across a variety of industries and check out these helpful tips for planning your enterprise storage needs. Contact us any time for a storage strategy review.

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In order for developers to keep up with the speed of business, new innovations in storage, backup, and are being rolled out at a breakneck pace. To stay competitive, enterprises must adopt these new methods and technologies for faster restores and greater opportunities to leverage the true value of data across their organization.

When fast isn’t fast enough

In recent months, an increasing number of legacy disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) architectures are being replaced with faster, more modern flash-to-flash-to-cloud (F2F2C) technologies across industries. This change is being pushed by the need for more than just a backup: today’s enterprises need to rapidly restore critical data in the right contexts for a competitive advantage. Any time taken to backup or restore data can become a business challenge – and those that can do it fastest are better positioned to drive business value.

F2F2C is designed for the scale and use cases modern enterprise companies now require. Unlike tape-based library systems, F2F2C architecture helps organizations modernize their data protection while putting them in a position for future innovations depending on how they leverage their IT for business value.

What is Flash-to-Flash-to-Cloud (F2F2C)?

Flash-to-Flash-to-Cloud helps companies recover data rapidly, save money via cloud economics, and streamline data reuse for workloads and business priorities. It helps organizations address the demands of backup, analytics, artificial intelligence, and regulatory compliance. One study published by 451 Research declared the performance boost provided by this all-flash model to be “tenfold or greater,” and “one of the most significant changes in recent IT history.”

F2F2C’s strength comes from its hybrid approach to data availability and protection, featuring both on-premises flash for greater agility and efficiency, and safe, cost-effective public clouds for long-term storage and security. Flash-based solutions are increasingly being used for mission-critical applications, combined with the more affordable, flexible, and scalable storage model offered by the public cloud. Together, the combination allows for rapid recovery during regular operations and experimentation, with resources in the cloud readily available if on-premises resources are not.

How your enterprise can benefit from Flash-to-Flash-to-Cloud (F2F2C)

Compared to storage and recovery methods previously used by enterprises, F2F2C provides faster recovery times which allows more regularity and re-purposing for new business initiatives in next-generation IT environments. Other features include:

• Instant VM and granular data recovery on demand
• By deploying one platform, you can power all data-intensive workloads – from backup to

F2F2C supports the always-on enterprises of the future, anticipating that most environments will be virtualized and users will require instant recovery to meet both performance and customer needs. Increasingly stringent regulatory requirements will also be met with F2F2C’s scalability, reduced silos, and more opportunities to segregate environments.

Nearly 60 percent of enterprises moving toward a environment are leveraging both on-premise systems and off-premise cloud. Those among them to adopt strategies will enjoy improved local performance, more sophisticated management capabilities, greater availability, and reduced redundancy compared to their competitors.

Minimize downtime with Veeam Availability Suite and Pure Storage

recognizes the challenges faced by companies in enabling the “always-on enterprise” model that runs 24/7/365. To make things easier, Veeam is helping companies meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

, which includes , offers a new kind of solution that delivers the following features:

• High-speed recovery
• Data loss avoidance
• Verified recoverability
• Complete visibility
• and much more…

It does so by leveraging virtualization, storage, and cloud services that enable the modern data center to help IT organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs.

When paired with Pure Storage’s end-to-end data platform, companies can begin to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The platform allows the consolidation of workloads without sacrificing performance while achieving 100 percent virtualization with confidence. Pure Storage enables scale from hundreds to thousands of VMs without disruption, and is completely managed inside vCenter.

provides fast and reliable block storage for your production data, as well as local snapshots for rapid restore, while FlashBlade enables you to store large data sets with a small data center footprint and restore them rapidly.

Work with WEI on upgrading your storage and recovery

Veeam Availability Suite with Pure Storage could be exactly what your business needs to maximize their data and push the boundaries of industry innovation. Contact WEI today to begin a conversation about building your custom F2F2C solution.

NEXT STEPS: Learn best practices for backup, recovery, and DR in this hybrid world of on-premises and cloud by reading one of our most popular white papers. Click the button below to get started.

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Enterprise Storage

When was the last time you gave your storage solutions an in-depth and thorough review? Whichever enterprise storage solution you use for your organization, it’s important to make sure that the brain of your operations is working smoothly and data is flowing where it’s needed, when it’s needed. An enterprise storage checkup can determine the performance of an storage system and reveals how strong of a fit the system is for your enterprise.

For organizations looking into modernizing their storage infrastructure, here are 9 things about Nimble storage that are worth noting.

1. Nimble Storage is simple to manage. (You don’t need to be a storage admin.)
   Nimble Storage was designed for ease of use. The arrays are automated and simplified. There’s no need to know raid levels, drive types, and what to put where. The array is designed to know these requirements already.
   
2. Nimble Infosight pays attention.
   It details not only your array, but it also monitors the health of your virtual environment. Infosight will warn you if a VM is performing poorly and IT administrators are notified before they would otherwise realize something is wrong. It can suggest when to add more storage, more cache, or more performance proactively. Reports can be generated as needed for presentations or for backing up requests.
3. Dedupe support.
   Nimble’s latest OS (5.0.3) now supports dedupe and compression on spinning disks. Get the most out of your investment. This software is even backwards compatible for older models, so you can benefit more from your storage investment. It enables IT teams to pack more data into a smaller space to save power, cooling, and space charges.
4. Nimble is both a scale up and a scale out ����������.��
   It is easy to add shelves and drives or combine up to 4 arrays to increase your storage. This gives you the most flexibility in storage expansion and design.
5. Less than 1 minute hold time before you reach a level 3 engineer
   Nobody likes to waste time on the phone with level 1 support. Get to the issue fast and a resolution faster.
   
6. 86% of opened cases are auto closed with a solution.
   Nimble Storage provides simple and fast support. A lot of issues have already been seen in other user’s environments. Nimble support correlates these issues and can resolve them quickly with known/proven solutions. Nimble will also proactively notify you of issues you may encounter so that you can avoid downtime or impacts to your environment.
7. Tightly integrates with Veeam.
   This provides the most functionality with your backups. Veeam integrated snapshots, replication awareness, and proven performance allow your backups to complete quickly and allows you to use your backups for more than just restores. You can spin up bubble environments to test upgrades/updates or new applications without impacting your production environment.
8. All flash arrays support triple parity+.
   You can lose up to 4 drives without a loss of data! One of the most resilient arrays on the market with a 6x9s uptime.
9. Quick setup and one of the fastest times to provisioning. Our engineers can install and configure your array in no time. This allows you to provision the storage in your environment quicker and expand your environment faster so that your business can be more agile. No more waiting weeks for implementation.

For many organizations, Nimble Storage is an essential tool contributing to digital transformation and a solution to consider in data center modernization initiatives. It brings benefits to a wide range of environments and is flexible enough to play well with many other technologies. Talk to WEI, an IT solutions provider and HPE Platinum Partner, to see if Nimble aligns with your enterprise storage needs and how it fits in your IT environment.

Next Steps: Do you want to get the most value from your storage investment? If so, download our white paper, “,” to learn whether your company could benefit from an enterprise storage checkup.

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The face of data storage in enterprise data centers has changed in the past few years with the rise to prominence of solid-state, or flash, storage. This advancement of storage technology has now become so widespread among enterprise IT infrastructures around the world that 49% of organizations surveyed by the indicated they already use flash technology, and another 38% have made plans to or are currently investigating the technology.

Flash or solid-state drive technology is seen commonly in devices from smartphones, laptops, and servers, but it has also revolutionized the storage array landscape. Of the organizations polled by ESG 63 percent reported using solid-state drives in storage subsystems today, 35 percent in all-flash arrays, and 30 percent as extended cache within hybrid storage systems.

Flash storage has increased in adoption due to its operational and economic benefits, ESG highlighted several of the following benefits from the survey respondents:

• Improved application performance
• Reduced power consumption
• Improved resource utilization
• Improved TCO
• Reduced operational expenses and improved SLAs

Better application performance isn’t flash storage’s only “plus”. Flash also brings significant decreases in power consumption over its HDD counterpart, dramatic reductions in rack and floor space, and features like data compression and deduplication that significantly maximize a healthy flash storage investment. Then there’s the decreasing cost per gigabyte of enterprise flash storage which makes it more accessible for many organizations. The timing on that is perfect because we are seeing more and more enterprise organizations struggle with accurately projecting storage needs with the exponential amount of data tied to critical applications and systems.

Data protection must adjust to cover exponential growth

Performance is a key benefit of a flash-based environment, and nearly 60 percent of current and potential users identified enhanced performance as a factor in their decision to deploy solid-state storage. But in an all-flash world, IT can’t let . By redefining the game for data storage, flash has also redefined the game for data protection by placing new requirements on the traditional mandate of speed and agility of recoveries, reliability of backup and recoveries, and increased speed or frequency of backups.

As far as features, flash storage is held to the same expectations of any enterprise environment including:

• Data deduplication for optimized storage footprint and TCO
• Application-consistent backups and hypervisor support
• Scalability
• Orchestration and automation of recovery processes
• Support of public and private cloud layers

These functions must be performed with no impact to production workloads. Data capture with tight data source storage integration is expected, as is data movement with direct data paths from primary to secondary storage. This is a commitment HPE has been working on with recent additions to its portfolio.

HPE Nimble and their 6-nines promise

According to the HPE website, is “smart enough to make 86% of problems disappear.” It leverages flash storage and predictive analytics to eliminate the app-data gap and guarantee 99.9999 percent availability.

Every second, HPE InfoSight analyzes and correlates millions of sensors from all of its globally deployed systems. As it works, it learns to predict and ultimately prevent the most common problems that can cause bottlenecks. In fact, ESG has quantified a 79 percent drop in operational expenditures related to costs and time spent managing storage.

Nimble Storage includes cloud native integration with AWS, Azure, and cloud-native API’s. () It is positioned as a very efficient family of arrays, with the ability to store more data per terabyte of flash storage than other all-flash arrays. It can also be combined with HPE Nimble Cloud Volumes for full cloud integration.

HPE Nimble delivers on more than just the sampling of benefits above. In case you missed it, HPE Nimble earned a spot in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays.

What does flash-integrated data protection look like?

(RMC) software integrates HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Nimble All Flash Arrays with HPE StoreOnce Systems to provide a flash-integrated snapshot, replication and backup service that augments traditional backup approaches.

HPE RMC delivers the end-to-end data protection and rapid recovery that your applications demand, from the data center to the cloud, whether you use on-premises flash storage for its low latency and security, cloud for its flexibility and cost benefits, or if you employ a hybrid IT approach to achieve your right mix of storage. HPE RMC has proven benefits, such as:

• Fast – Deliver on SLAs with fast, non-disruptive, application consistent backup and recovery
• Efficient – Eliminate cost and complexity of traditional backup approaches with direct backup from HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble to StoreOnce
• Reliable – Protect applications with the performance of snapshots and the protection of backups
• Simple – Empower hypervisor and application owners to control backup and recovery direct and seamlessly from their preferred native interfaces

HPE RMC also delivers rapid, non-disruptive backup and online recovery. The solution eliminates the backup window and enables rapid online recovery with fast, non-disruptive, application-consistent snapshots. ( This reduces the backup impact on your applications, which supports the performance of your HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble flash deployment. HPE has really taken a holistic approach to the storage needs of the modern enterprise with these offerings, and WEI’s team of storage experts can help you determine which of these solutions (if any, or all, of them) are the right fit for your enterprise’s storage portfolio.

The takeaways

Flash storage is delivering on its promises of improved performance and efficiency, effectively changing storage and IT infrastructure in the data center as we know it. But it has also created a new set of requirements – particularly for data protection. In order to keep up the benefits delivered by flash technology, data protection processes have evolved to keep up with the sheer amount of data and speed at which it is being handled in storage.

HPE’s Nimble uses predictive analytics to recognize and resolve potential problems before they require support, and has cut expenses related to human management of storage by nearly 80 percent. With numbers like those, it might be worth taking a closer look. Contact the storage experts at WEI to learn how HPE Nimble, and HPE’s portfolio of storage and data protection solutions, can fit in your IT environment.

NEXT STEPS: Are you exploring flash storage or running into challenges managing it effectively? Check out our free download below to help you ensure you are making the right investment with flash storage.

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By now you’ve heard about VMware vSAN, a solution that combines direct storage devices across a vSphere cluster to create a shared data area distributed across an enterprise network. With vSAN, the user is able to decide on the storage requirements, performance and availability and makes sure the policies put in place are upheld. These are not the only benefits of Keep reading to discover four ways your enterprise can benefit from it.

1. Agility: When discussing IT infrastructure, agility is one of the primary justifications for moving an enterprise to the cloud or to hybrid IT model. It is also a big reason why organizations are introducing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions into their data center. In order to compete in the digital environment, they are implementing software-based solutions in place of their legacy hardware infrastructure. With vSAN, you can leverage your or SSD technology structure, upgrading it when business demands, or new technology justifies it. Using vSAN, you only buy what you need today, and tomorrow, next year and the foreseeable future – putting you in control.

2. Simplicity: Not only is vSAN agile, it is also simple to use and to enable on your enterprise’s existing vSphere That’s because it is already integrated with it. VMware gives you the flexibility to source your hardware and software independently, which can reduce your deployment costs. This has been illustrated in a variety of cost case comparisons to other solutions. VMware’s vSAN allows you to maximize your current vSphere environment so that installation and configuration are completed with just a few mouse clicks. VMware has set out to make the user experience of its HCI platform so simple that it can be managed by IT generalists, instead of dedicated experts.

3. Security: One of the most significant downsides to living in a digital age is the rise of hackers and cybercriminals who are constantly working to find new ways to exploit personal and confidential data. For this reason, security must be fully integrated into any IT component or device in order to protect the data that drives ideas for your enterprise. VMware vSAN offers the industry’s first native HCI encryption that protects and builds data-at-rest encryption into the kernel. It then enables it at the cluster level, and encrypts all objects in the vSAN data without the need for expensive self-encrypting drives. Whether you utilize hybrid or all flash configurations, your data is protected and complies with both U.S. Federal Security and GDPR requirements. Built-in security is one of the reasons VMware vSAN is identified as an HCI industry leader.

4. Total Cost of Ownership: Total cost of ownership (TCO) encompasses all aspects of ownership from equipment and installation to maintenance and running costs. Designed with the ability to deploy vSAN without having to purchase new hardware and the simplicity to allow general IT personnel to manage service delivery, makes vSAN’s TCO lower than other storage area networks that require new hardware and experts on the solution. Beyond the cost to deploy and run vSAN, security is another factor of total cost of ownership. Security breaches can cost enterprises hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, repairs and labor. With the ability to encrypt data at the kernel level without having to invest in costly drives, lowers the total cost of ownership – saving your enterprise now and in the future.

Final Thoughts

VMware vSAN is the smart choice for enterprises with a VMware environment. Its agility allows modification as your enterprise needs it, it’s simple to deploy, and is easy to use by almost anyone on your IT team. It also safeguards your enterprise’s confidential data through kernel level encryption. All of these factors lead to a lower total cost of ownership through its lifetime, and makes it the obvious choice to fill your enterprise’s need for a virtual storage solution.

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