Is Your Data Center Ready for Petabytes?

Traditional enterprise storage systems are siloed and increasingly complex to maintain, manage, and scale—often with underutilized assets that drive up total cost of ownership (TCO). Data center managers often have to choose between speed and cost in designing their systems. This, despite precipitous price drops and dramatic advancements in speed, reliability, and accessibility for storage technologies such as solid-state drives and non-volatile memory (NVMe).

Driving speed and efficiency into storage systems is an imperative in the data center. Organizations need a cost-effective storage architecture that can provide more flexibility in how they manage a wide variety of data—even on an enormous scale—as well as support demand-driven resource allocation. Server-based cloud storage solutions enabled by software-defined infrastructure (SDI) offers one of the best options for the levels of efficiency and flexibility required to meet growing application and user demands for data. Built on scale-out storage architecture, server-based storage is managed on premises and takes advantage of the efficiencies offered by cloud computing.

Server-based solutions are available today that can help data centers be more responsive to users and changing business requirements and deliver new and faster services, such as chargeback or analytics. These can maximize existing investments, reducing costs through greater TCO efficiencies.

With software-defined scale-out storage architectures, you overcome storage integration issues by resource-pooling data and managing storage across systems. SDI uses workload-specific profiles with performance and latency attributes to bridge siloed storage systems and route service requests to the right device. Server-based solutions can:

• Pool storage resources across systems
• Improve storage and data management efficiency
• Increase application performance
• Reduce storage infrastructure costs
• Improve user access to data

Software-defined server-based storage brings your data center closer to being able to handle data on a massive scale with the same efficiency as large cloud providers.

Server-based storage uses open-standard, x86-based hardware that takes advantage of multiple storage resources—solid-state drives with NVMe, external disk systems, object platforms, and cloud-based resources, for example—to build a powerful storage infrastructure that can deliver workload-optimized performance.

Other benefits:

• Tighter data control
• Increased flexibility and scalability
• Accelerate business innovation

This brief describes how to approach implementing SDI-enabled server-based storage solutions in your data center and includes a checklist to help get you started.