You’re probably familiar with the popular saying from the 1990s: “Innovate or die.” It was true then and probably even more true today. We are in an era of rapid innovation and disruption driven by advances in information technology—cloud computing, all-flash storage, social networks, big data, artificial intelligence and containerization, to name a few.
Organizations that can harness technology to drive seamless, continuous innovation are at a huge advantage, particularly in addressing modern digital transformation imperatives. With continuous innovation, you can accelerate development cycles, reduce costs and more readily meet the demands of today’s highly consumerized markets.
IT teams are in a unique position to empower their organizations with that advantage. For most organizations, the path to continuous innovation starts with an infrastructure platform that allows IT to access the latest and most advanced technology without experiencing downtime or having to re-architect data centers with forklift upgrades every few years.
Harnessing the power of continuous innovation
The concept behind continuous innovation is for companies to act quickly and adapt seamlessly to meet the rapidly changing needs of current and future customers, according to an article in the International Journal on Advanced Science Engineering and Information Technology.1
The article notes that continuous innovation is one of the most discussed topics in the innovation management sector, driven by hyper-competition, globalization, rapid technology advancement, shortening of product lifecycles and a more dynamic business environment.
“The pressure for companies to increase their capabilities in innovation is getting more intense with the fast development of information and communication technology and digitalization in business,” the article states.2
For IT professionals, the question is not whether to embrace the concept of continuous innovation. Rather, it is how to ensure that the underlying technology infrastructure enables the organization to easily embed innovation as a critical piece of the overall corporate culture.
Top 5 Reasons to Choose FlashStack
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Download NowLeveraging converged infrastructure
Many IT leaders are finding that the right converged infrastructure platform can make it much simpler, faster and more cost efficient to access innovation without disrupting existing processes, people or technologies.
With converged infrastructure, IT can accelerate deployments, reduce costs and simplify management by using pre-configured solutions that integrate compute, storage and networking, including the latest advances in all-flash storage, network fabrics and high-density servers.
The challenge, however, is that not all converged infrastructure solutions are designed to meet the unique demands of continuous innovation. To truly embrace innovation flexibility, the platform must be built on an underlying architecture that is stateless and fully modular.
Choosing the right solution
The right architecture is critical because you need the ability to deploy the latest technology advances seamlessly without requiring downtime of existing applications. You also want to be able to refresh the technology at any time, without having to re-architect your data center solutions.
For example, NVMe is an important advance in all-flash storage, delivering price/performance improvements versus earlier arrays. The benefits are particularly dramatic if you choose solutions from Pure Storage™, which does not charge a premium for arrays with NVMe technology.
As an IT decision-maker, you may want to modernize performance-critical workloads to NVMe without having to re-architect your existing data center solutions or prematurely end the lifecycle of non-NVMe arrays that can still meet the needs of many workloads.
The only converged infrastructure platform designed to enable this kind of continuous innovation is FlashStack™ from Pure Storage and Cisco™. FlashStack’s fully modular and non-disruptive architecture abstracts hardware into software for non-disruptive changes, allowing customers to seamlessly deploy technology without having to re-architect.
The impact on innovation and development can be dramatic. According to an IDC study, application developers using FlashStack were able to increase the number of features added per year by an average of 25%. This translates to a 15% higher level of developer productivity and a value of more than $1 million per year to the organization.3
Conclusion
In today’s business environment, the ability to innovate quickly and leverage actionable data are qualities that continue to reshape industries across the globe. For IT decision-makers, the pressure is on to deploy solutions that enable continuous innovation and empower development teams with the resources they need—whenever and wherever they need them. The right converged infrastructure can put your organization on the right path. Please visit the links within the special section to find out more about how FlashStack can help you drive innovation at your organization.
1 “Continuous Innovation: A Literature Review and Future Perspective,” International Journal on Advanced Science Engineering and Information Technology, June 2018.
2 Ibid.
3 “FlashStack Delivers Business Value Through Performance and Scalability,” IDC, September 2018.
