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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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.

Want more information on vSAN?

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• The complexity of managing the ever expanding scale of data storage infrastructure
• The challenge of accessing the immense scale of data
• The challenge of dealing with different types of data

Companies have kept pace with the mounting storage explosion of file-based data by purchasing more storage. This of course only adds to management complexity. Recently, companies have gravitated to flash storage in order to increase the efficiency and speed of writing and accessing data. This however, creates a conundrum in that not all data is created or used equally. While the cost of permanent flash storage is substantiated by high value data, unstructured data may not justify it. According to Qumulo, “Unstructured, file-based data is the crown jewel of the modern day enterprise and petabyte scale data storage is the new normal.”

Fortunately, there are pioneers who are paving the way to the next generation of data storage solutions. One of these trailblazers is Qumulo, a leader in data-aware scale-out NAS solutions. Many data intensive organizations are turning to scale-out storage systems to obtain control of their data. Gartner in fact estimates that more than 80% of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers, up from 30% today.

Qumulo Core

Qumulo’s foundational solution is Qumulo Core; a new generation of scale-out storage engineered to store and manage unstructured and file-based data at web-scale. This scale-out file and object storage is a software-defined solution that runs on commodity hardware, providing increased scalability and cost effectiveness. Qumulo core software gives you the flexibility to run just about anywhere because it uses no custom device drivers or proprietary hardware. This allows it to run on a variety of standard platforms… Two popular options today include their pre-engineered appliance with HPE, who now offers it on their Apollo servers, in lieu of their partnership with Qumulo. Qumulo Core can also be run on virtual machines both on-premises and in the cloud.

Qumulo Core utilizes a flash-first hybrid design that uses both solid-state drives (SSD) and high-density hard disk drives (HDD) in separate tiers to achieve the optimal balance between capacity, performance, and cost. All data is initially written to SSD. When accessing recently written data, these SSDs serve as cache. As your storage capacity grows, data that is accessed less frequently is moved to HDDs. This ensures that the right data is matched with the right media.

Another dilemma for companies is how they obtain visibility of their data in order to best determine what it is and how it is stored and used. Qumulo Core’s data-aware design is built to handle tens of billions of files and provides visibility control for file systems at petabyte scale. It offers real-time analytics built into the file system itself that fosters greater visibility into which data is most valuable and where it is stored. With Qumulo Core, storage administrators know which users or applications are accessing what files and what data is backed up. Just as important, it provides insight into why data is growing. Because administrators can see usage, activity and throughput at any level of the unified directory structure, they can better pinpoint problems and effectively manage how storage is used. Its signature (QSFS) captures information about the data being stored, creating a footprint of that data. Qumulo leverages this information through a patented database built directly into the nodes of the file system, and designed to answer queries against that data.

Flexible and Dedicated Support

Because Qumulo is software based, it is constantly delivering innovation through continual software updates. Qumulo also monitors the health of your data cluster, analyzing performance and reporting failures in real time. For those customers running Qumulo on HPE Apollo servers, hardware issues are reported to HPE’s support organization. Customers that enroll in the Qumulo Customer Care Program are even assigned their own customer success manager that will guide you throughout the product lifecycle.

Curious to learn more about Qumulo and its scale-out storage systems and solutions? Talk to WEI about our experience with Qumulo and how our customers are utilizing Qumulo to manage enterprise data storage. Contact us today.

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• What software or firmware version are you running?
• Have you made any changes recently to the unit?
• Can you access the administrative console?
• Are there any lights flashing on the drives?
• Is your data currently available

Once these questions are answered, a brief interruption of one or two minutes occurs as your call is forwarded to the appropriate technical engineer. The first thing the technician requests is for you to pull a log from the unit. The technician then may ask you to email the log, at which point you have to carefully listen as the technician spells out their email address. Sometimes, the technician will email you a link for you to upload the log using some sort of secure FTP process. Once the log is in the hands of the engineer, he or she asks you to wait while they review the log.

You now have fifteen minutes of your precious time involved with this call. Perhaps the issue is simply a bad drive. You know it is a bad drive because of the amber light above it, the fact that the admin console says the drive is currently unavailable or unrecognized, and the fact that this identical problem has occurred several times before and your experience says you simply need a new drive. The engineer comes back on the line, confirms that the drive is bad, and begins the five to ten minute ordeal of processing a replacement drive.

Now perhaps since you knew the problem was simply a bad drive, you delayed the call by a day due to an involved deployment you were implementing that would add value to your company. Perhaps the issue was far more involved, and after an hour with Level 2 support, you were than upgraded to Level 3 support, which meant having to wait for a call back from the subsequent engineer.

Sound familiar? Up until recently, vendor technical support was always conducted this way.

How The Nimble Storage Experience is Different

You can forget all of this with support. So how is Nimble different? Let’s start with the scenario of the hard drive failure. First off, you would have never placed the call in the first place. This is because Nimble support would already know about it before you did. When a drive fails, the event is immediately picked up and a ticket is opened. Nimble knows that it is a simple case of a failed drive because it can see everything about your array. A drive is shipped overnight and is ready for you to replace in the morning. This is standard protocol with Nimble because 90% of the time, Nimble tells you the problem before you are aware of it. It is an entirely new experience and in the rare times you do have to contact you are not greeted by a customer service representative to discern what type of problem you are experiencing.

• Your call is instantly picked up by a Level 3 engineer. In fact, there is no Level 1 and 2 because there are no problems at those levels that you have to worry about. Nimble solves these problems before they are an issue.
• Nimble support will never ask you what version you are running. They already know.
• Nimble support will already know of any changes you may have made recently.
• Nimble support does not have to ask you to access the administrative console because they are constantly monitoring and addressing issues.

All of this is made possible by , which is integrated into Nimble’s storage solutions. Every Nimble storage array in the world sends machine data to InfoSight in the cloud thanks to the thousands of sensors that are located within the operating system of each and every Nimble storage unit. Nimble is not just about storage, it is about intelligence. This built in intelligence is what allows HPE InfoSight to actively monitor your storage environment, predicting most problems before they occur. When an issue is uncovered, HPE InfoSight proactively resolves it.

Nimble storage is not just a storage solution. It is a solution built around reducing risk, improving reliability, and maximizing the productivity of your infrastructure and IT personnel. For your company, it is a competitive advantage. For the IT manager, it just makes your job easier.

Next Steps: Learn more about the potential of software defined storage solutions by downloading our white paper,

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Software defined storage (SDS) has the potential to revolutionize your business processes and drive extraordinary value. However, storage isn’t just measured by capacity. In our previous blog post, we laid out the example of thinking of your organization’s storage infrastructure like a virtual city: there are specific places designated for each type of data, from highly-utilized information to archives. Because of this, there is a true need for segmenting your resources; today, SDS is finally allocating true Automated Storage Tiering (AST) for enterprises. AST has created a natural and timely partnership with flash storage to offer the speed and performance that personal computing devices have enjoyed for years and many organizations are now considering all-flash based arrays to meet the demands of server virtualization.

The Case for Tier Separation

The from $1,409.7 million in 2014 to $6,217.6 million by 2019, at an estimated compound annual growth rate of 34.6 percent from 2014 to 2019. Your organization creates and demands all types of data, and each of these data classes summons different demands from your storage infrastructure. To meet these needs, your data infrastructure should be separated into multiple tiers.

For example, one type of data may require (and justify) incredibly high performance, no matter the cost, while other data classes only require modest performance at a reasonable cost. On the other end of the spectrum, long-term retention data and archived information can settle for minimum levels of performance.

A possible example of an Automated Storage Tiering design could look like this:

• Tier 0: Flash Storage.
• Tier 1: Production storage (prior to Flash storage, this used to be the top tier). High value data that is regularly utilized should reside here.
• Tier 2: Intermittent storage. Low cost/performance disks can be implemented for data that is only accessed every so often.
• Tier 3: Tape storage, which is necessary for required archives with strict government and industry regulations.

The idea of Automated Storage Tiering in an SDS environment is nothing new; it has been around for decades, but has previously lacked the intelligence mechanism to optimally implement it. Up until now, storage was assigned by age or some similar determinate that provided a best guess at tier assignments. Today, SDS systems use sophisticated algorithms that calculate usage and relative demand of data chunks. Then, data can be elevated or demoted between the available tiers.

Cloud Computing Makes Automated Storage Tiering Possible

The cloud is creating even greater opportunities for AST as more organizations are employing cloud-based storage. Cloud service providers and vendors are now offering storage devices that serve as a front-end storage appliance for the cloud. Rather than moving data between different physical hardware, these appliances shuffle data between local direct attached storage (DAS) locations and the cloud. They can also provide large caching depositories for data that is being saved off-premise.

The decisions organizations make are only as good as the data that is used to formulate them. We are in an era where the value of a company can be directly attributed not only to the value of its data, but the ease of its accessibility, and the capability and aptitude to analyze and process it. The decoupling of software from hardware is opening the door for new innovations and is giving IT managers the levels of data management and cost control that up until recently was only imaginable.

The benefits and value of SDS is being recognized by top industry leaders and future tech disruptors. Do you think it’s time for your organization to embrace SDS as well?

Read the white paper, to learn more, then to discuss which SDS solution is right for your business.

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