The purpose of infrastructure―whether on premises or in the cloud―is to maximize business opportunities. Infrastructure today must deliver agility, ensure application performance and reliability, enable great customer experiences, accelerate development cycles and simplify IT as a service.
That means building an application stack that is fast and flexible in meeting service-level agreements (SLAs), can run any workload in hours and never requires a forklift upgrade. It means using an infrastructure platform that supports the organization’s cloud efforts while maximizing performance, simplicity and agility.
Can you ensure that your infrastructure modernization efforts are up to the task? Here are six ways to transform your business using FlashStack as the foundation for a modern, flexible infrastructure architecture.
No. 1. Accelerate time to market. Infrastructure modernization does not need to be the monolithic process it has been in the past. Deployments should be virtually plug and play, with the ability to run any workload in hours. This will improve productivity across your workforce, especially in vital areas such as IT and DevOps. Development cycles are accelerated because IT resources can be spun up quickly and efficiently, with flexibility to deliver targeted capacity and performance for each workload.
No. 2. Meet your most stringent SLAs. Speed and performance are table stakes for infrastructure today. Many organizations have found that moving mission-critical data-driven apps to the public cloud has led to insurmountable performance gaps and out-of-control expenses. According to IDC, more than 85% of enterprises are considering or executing repatriation of workloads back to the data center from public cloud—and performance is usually cited as one of the key factors. Look for a solution that uses best-of-breed technology and provides innovative technologies to meet the performance requirements of any application and workload.
No. 3. Ensure high availability/minimize downtime. Application downtime costs the average enterprise $20.1 million in lost revenue and productivity, according to the 2019 Cloud Data Management Report. Lost data from mission-critical application downtime costs more than $102,000 per hour. With a stateless architecture, organizations can eliminate planned downtime and reduce the risk of unplanned downtime. In addition, a single management console and centralized vendor service and support further reduce risk.
No. 4. Support multicloud environments. The shift to multicloud is one of the important trends in IT and business. More than 45% of IT decision-makers say private and hybrid cloud investments are one of their top priorities for 2020, according to TechTarget. On-premises infrastructure must deliver IT-as-a-service capabilities and provide simple API-driven integrations with public cloud services and data portability to the cloud. If you’re investing in on-premises infrastructure in 2020, you want modern solutions that are more cloud-like than what most legacy data center environments can deliver.
No. 5. Reduce costs and deploy flexible pricing models. With a flexible, modern on-premises architecture, IT teams have a wide variety of ways to reduce costs. They can leverage centralized software-defined management, data reduction through deduplication, artificial intelligence and machine learning to reduce the costs of lifecycle management, and automation to accelerate deployment. They can also use IT personnel more strategically, scale resources without disruption, and uncouple compute, storage and network resources. In addition, IT benefits from flexible pricing models that offer the ability to “pay as your grow,” avoiding the often wrong “let’s plan three years ahead” traditional procurement model.
No. 6. Consume innovation more easily. One of the challenges with traditional on-premises infrastructure models is that you typically need to do forklift upgrades every few years. This is expensive, time-consuming and risky, and it’s an unending cycle. However, by using a solution with a stateless architecture for storage and compute, you can eliminate forklift upgrades forever. This enables you to embrace “innovation without rearchitecting,”seamlessly modernizing your infrastructure with the most advanced technology as soon as it becomes available. Granular, nondisruptive expansion capabilities provide the missing piece to solving the classic capacity planning conundrum.
FlashStack—Energize IT
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Does this seem like an impossible list? FlashStack can deliver all of these capabilities―and if you haven’t looked at FlashStack recently, it may be time for another look.
As IT decision-makers are facing important decisions in their infrastructure investments in 2020, what you buy today has to provide a foundation for the future. Key questions to ask include:
- Does the solution use a stateless infrastructure to simplify scaling and provide easy access to new technologies?
- Does it utilize best-of-breed technologies from leading, innovative providers in compute, storage and networking?
- Can the solution support hybrid and private cloud models with the flexibility, capacity and performance required by any workload?
- Is the solution easy to deploy, grow and manage?
- Does the solution provide flexibility to optimize performance, availability and capacity for mission-critical applications?
- Does it make our organization more productive, agile and responsive to the needs of our employees and customers?
To find answers to these and other questions, please visit Cisco and Pure Storage and review the resources on this site to learn how FlashStack can help your organization achieve its most important business goals.
