Is There a Smarter Way to Manage Storage?
There’s a thorny problem facing IT pros today: CIOs, strapped with budgetary constraints, have adopted a “don’t fix it unless it’s broken” approach to storage. The problem with that approach is that storage is the heart of IT; continuing to rely on storage solutions with a basic architecture developed two decades ago won’t give forward-thinking businesses the advanced data archival and retrieving capabilities that new business pressures are demanding of them.
IT leaders are finding themselves at a fork in the road. They’ve got issues with how their company is storing, accessing and mining its data, but their budgets haven’t grown in step with their internal users’ IT expectations. They want to know if maintaining the status quo will be more costly than pursuing new storage innovations. The short answer is, yes.
The adoption of new storage innovations – particularly those that are “software-defined-ready” – will become increasingly more important to CIOs as their job functions shift from managing specific applications and systems to more advanced delivery of technical services. IT departments are expected to be able to mine more value from the information at their disposal while simultaneously reducing that data’s risk exposure. As a result, legacy storage built on decades-old frameworks is quickly giving way to new storage technologies optimized for the converged infrastructure – particularly software-defined storage devices that separate the management of the device from the device itself.
No matter which vendor’s products a CIO employs in storage solutions going forward, it’s critical that they choose wisely, ensuring that the devices they buy today are enabled for the converged and software-defined environments they will be running tomorrow.