Moving from distributed storage to a single environment greatly reduces the need for a surplus. Instead of a separate pool on each box, you'll have a smaller, centralized store for any of the connected environments. Voil, just-in-time storage allocation. Administrators can set standard threshold alarms for capacity limits and allocate storage from the centralized pool as needed.
Automation tools reduce the significant labor costs associated with storage-provisioning tasks, according to a Yankee Group report. What's more, centralized storage is easier to manage than distributed storage once it's up and running, thanks primarily to fewer moving parts. With fewer devices and more robust management tools and flexibility, your IT staff can concentrate on more pressing issues.
McKinsey & Co. says SAN and NAS solutions yield economies of scale that can reduce staffing costs by up to 80 percent. Shops with large-scale SANs manage storage four to eight times more efficiently than those using conventional methods. So if your site has four people managing the storage farm, it may take only one person to deliver the same level of support post-centralization.
At a minimum, a happily humming SAN or NAS implementation will free staff from the drudgery of storage management. No more never-ending tape-swapping, RAID-drive replacement or dry eyes from reading capacity monitors. By consolidating your data-center storage, you move all your RAID stacks and tape loaders into one area. When it's time to swap a drive or load your DLT, everything is right at hand, rather than in a locked cabinet halfway across your production floor.
There are plenty of real-life success stories. Recently, a capacity-management type told us his storage centralization tale. His company, a Fortune 500 financial services firm, was looking at a large server refresh (more than 1,400 boxes) in its primary data center.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
