In a marketplace characterised by extreme change and uncertainty, business agility is becoming essential to enable companies to respond rapidly, retain momentum and succeed.
Business agility means the ability to adapt quickly and easily to change—and it can have a significant impact on your bottom line. According to McKinsey & Company, companies embracing agility can boost their financial performance by 20-30% while improving operations, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. In addition, business agility can help organisations increase the speed of decision-making, improve productivity, enhance customer experience, accelerate innovation, and advance their time-to-market, making it easier to compete effectively and gain a competitive edge.
Let’s take a look at three HPE solutions that can increase enterprise agility, step up the speed of IT service delivery and accelerate your business growth.
1. Shifting to as-a-Service
Migrating from traditional to consumption-based IT models can deliver the simplicity, flexibility and agility of the cloud, with the security and control of on-premises infrastructure. Many businesses are considering this shift to accelerate innovation and rapidly meet evolving customer needs in today’s fast-paced and disruptive business landscape.
HPE GreenLake is a consumption-based IT model that aligns with capacity usage. It gives you access to your choice of leading-edge technologies, delivered on a pay-per-use basis without any hefty capital outlays or switching costs. Against a backdrop of uncertainty, consumption-based IT makes financial sense as it improves forecasting and enables more effective cash-flow management. An improved cash flow can reduce debt, fund growth, ensure business continuity and provide the agility for businesses to quickly change direction and act on opportunities.
HPE GreenLake’s capacity management is based on usage trends and allows you to scale up in minutes and access new capacity to meet demand and changing market conditions. This provides flexibility, improves predictability, and reduces overprovisioning, which can be costly. Many of today’s IT departments are trying to do more with the same or fewer resources. HPE GreenLake is managed for you, which takes care of IT operations and keeps things running smoothly, freeing IT departments to focus on strategic business priorities and innovation.
An intuitive self-service software platform, HPE GreenLake Central, provides a unified view of your whole IT environment and enables you to simplify and automate management, rapidly deploy services, draw insights, and monitor costs.
Reducing complexity and speeding up IT service delivery through Everything-as-a-Service can enable you to work faster and smarter, boost innovation, realise efficiencies and enhance customer experience.
2. Unlocking agility with dHCI
Many businesses have adopted hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions to help them speed their time-to-market, innovate more quickly and scale more efficiently while mitigating risk.
HCI delivers software-defined flexibility, simpler management and scalability, and better economics. As HCI has been successfully utilised for many general-purpose applications, IT teams have begun to deploy it for more demanding business-critical workloads. HCI clusters have been expanded by adding nodes with fixed ratios of compute and storage resources to manage these workloads and deliver high levels of availability. This is not an ideal solution, as some workloads might require a higher degree of compute capacity than storage (or vice versa). Yet, administrators are forced to include a resource they don’t need, which can become costly in larger configurations. Resiliency is also compromised if a node fails, as recovery times in an HCI environment can be lengthy, and downtime can stall productivity and disrupt business.
Disaggregated HCI (dHCI) delivers the benefits of traditional HCI, but with the compute, networking, and storage separated so they can be scaled independently and non-disruptively, allowing you to create an optimal mix of compute and storage resources that can be easily adjusted, reducing over-provisioning, and providing a flexible platform that is efficient, reliable and easy to scale.
HPE’s Nimble Storage dHCI combines HPE ProLiant servers with HPE Nimble Storage arrays into a single intelligent platform that disaggregates compute and storage and integrates hyperconverged control. It can be deployed in under 20 minutes using server and storage automation and is simple to manage and scale.
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is supported by HPE InfoSight, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect, prevent and automatically resolve issues. It delivers faster application performance, high resiliency and promises ‘6-nines’ (99,9999%) availability. It supports mission-critical workloads and can position your business to respond swiftly to changing market conditions and accelerate your time-to-value.
3. Reimagining data storage
As businesses race to transform themselves and bring new applications to market, more data is being collected than ever before. The surge in the adoption of connected technologies and IoT (the Internet of Things) has seen organisations gather data from a network of remote sensors and chips placed in anything from household objects and cars to industrial machinery and supply chains. This data provides accurate, real-time insights that can be used to improve products and services, monitor changing consumer demand patterns, streamline operations and quickly unlock business value. However, the legacy storage infrastructure that many companies rely on cannot keep up with the growing needs of the business, driving organisations to re-evaluate their data strategies.
HPE Nimble Storage delivers a cloud experience that enables you to accelerate innovation and respond quickly to new challenges without compromising the performance and availability of mission-critical applications and data.
HPE Nimble Storage has incorporated flash storage with predictive analytics via HPE InfoSight into its core architecture to self-optimise application performance and resources in real-time and ensure operational system reliability. HPE InfoSight is a global analytics platform that applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to proactively identify, predict and prevent almost all problems across the infrastructure layers before they arise, ensuring availability and dramatically reducing unplanned downtime.
This predictive support automation has eliminated the requirement for Level 1 and Level 2 support. And with HPE Nimble Storage, you have direct access to Level 3 support engineers, ensuring storage-related issues are quickly resolved. It is simple to install, provision and operate and can be easily scaled without disruption. Its Multicloud Flash Fabric automates Storage management through a unified interface and enables seamless data mobility across on-premises storage platforms and the public cloud.
HPE Nimble Storage ensures IT agility, application performance, and availability and delivers the speed, scale, access, and flexibility to make your business more data-driven and dynamic.
Get in touch
There are many ways to increase business agility and resilience – I’ve touched on just three. If you are interested in improving your business agility to enable your business to respond to market changes with digital solutions quickly, contact iOCO today. We can provide the knowledge, expertise and technology to create a bespoke solution that effectively addresses your unique business needs.
By Richard Blewitt, Business Executive: Sales, iOCO Infrastructure and Services