IT teams are at a crossroads. They must embrace IT modernization to evolve to a service-oriented model that drives improvements in agility, innovation and cost efficiencies. At the same time, however, they likely have significant investments in technologies that are currently powering their business-critical applications.
Can you modernize to a service-oriented cloud model without disrupting your business? Can you leverage a platform that lets you seamlessly merge new and old infrastructures? Can you reduce complexity, improve performance, increase agility and future-proof your investment so you can refresh without re-architecting?
If these are some of the existential questions facing you and your team, the answers are yes, yes and yes. You can do it all. The key, as it is with so many critical IT decisions, is to choose the right solutions from the right technology partners.
In this case, you can meet today’s cloud era challenge of merging old and new IT by leveraging a modern converged infrastructure platform—one that delivers simplicity across the entire stack and enables your teams to use tools and processes they are already familiar with.
With the right solution, you can use a common platform for both traditional and converged operating models. This will let you consolidate at your own pace and eliminate unnecessary silos. Your infrastructure can be managed by a single team—saving you time and money and helping to address the critical IT personnel shortages facing most organizations.
Old and new together
The new reality is that today’s IT teams face an environment of growing complexity. Traditional workloads, from application vendors like Oracle™, SAP™ and Microsoft™, must be maintained and modernized to meet new requirements for agility, mobility, big data analytics and other innovations.
But modernization must occur at a pace that does not disrupt operations or prematurely make existing infrastructure prematurely obsolete. At the same time, new cloud-native workloads must be accommodated and their development must be encouraged, accelerated and empowered.
This is all taking place in an environment where data is growing exponentially and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT) and machine learning, are demanding very rapid access to large data sets to drive business value.
For many enterprises, the acquisition and management costs of continuing to purchase servers and storage separately for each of these applications is impractical and prohibitive. It is also unnecessary, given the availability of a converged infrastructure platform that lets you manage old and new infrastructure together using standard management tools, processes and investments.
Top 5 Reasons to Choose FlashStack
Access this paper to learn the top 5 reasons to go with FlashStack when deploying your next-generation workload.
Download NowWhat to look for in a solution
There are certain characteristics you should look for in a converged infrastructure platform to enable you to meet the needs of your business-critical workloads as well as your new cloud-native workloads.
Performance is critical. You need a solution that can meet the needs of modern workloads such as big data analytics so you can ingest, analyze and access actionable data at massive scale.
Therefore, the solution must leverage all-flash storage arrays and, ideally, using the latest NVMe technology. The network fabric is also critical to performance, as is the use of high-density servers.
It is also important to use technologies and management platforms that are simple to deploy, leveraging automation to ease the strain on IT teams with consistent tools across the entire infrastructure, on-premises and in the cloud.
The benefits of FlashStack™
FlashStack, the converged infrastructure solution from Cisco™ and Pure Storage™, enables IT teams to manage old and new IT without disruption, using a modular stateless architecture that offers flexibility in using Capex and Opex purchasing models. Deployment and management processes are simple and highly automated, enabling easy scalability and fast, non-disruptive access to the latest technology innovations.
By deploying FlashStack converged infrastructure with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, IT teams can leverage centralized, policy-defined automation management, multi-tenancy and seamless networking infrastructure for running both modern and traditional applications.
By deploying FlashStack with NVMe arrays from Pure Storage, IT teams can deliver massive performance gains to cloud-native workloads as well as traditional workloads—without incurring incremental storage costs.
Conclusion
For IT teams, the excitement of deploying new cloud-native workloads is tempered by the reality that the foundation of any organization is built on the reliability, performance, availability and security of business-critical apps from vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. You can’t have one without the other. With the right converged infrastructure platform you don’t have to choose where to invest your resources—you can invest in both at the same time, ensuring the convergence of old and new IT without compromise and without risk.
