Digital transformation and dynamic business models are fast becoming the key to success for many businesses. Data is an invaluable asset that underpins modern digital transformation strategies—data-driven insights can help organisations solve business challenges, make better decisions, and transform day-to-day operations, enabling them to grow their revenue and gain a competitive advantage.
Every organisation has workloads that are essential to the success of their business, and the data storage infrastructure for these mission-critical workloads can enable companies to drive innovation. This storage platform must meet the demands of a range of workloads with different performance requirements while ensuring high availability and reliability. Digital transformation typically requires companies to modernise their IT infrastructure using a range of new technologies such as solid-state storage, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), software-defined infrastructure, and the cloud. The introduction of these new technologies can make a business model more dynamic; however, they can also increase management complexities. What’s more, workloads have evolved drastically, and data growth is exploding. IDC1 predicts that by 2025, the world will generate 163ZB (a zettabyte = a billion bytes) of data every year. Businesses need to collect, clean, store, protect, analyse, and manage this data, which is hugely time-consuming.
HPE estimates that over half of businesses experience downtime due to insufficient capacity planning. Data overload, unpredictable workload demands, and growing maintenance and security requirements can halt strategic initiatives if storage systems lack the performance, scale, agility, and effÂiciency to keep up. Many IT teams are struggling to keep pace with the demands of mission-critical applications as much of their time is spent managing, troubleshooting, and supporting infrastructure rather than on innovation.
The need for an intelligent storage platform to meet the growing demands of mission-critical workloads is becoming apparent. IDC maintains that as transformation efforts continue, CIOs will need more simplified and automated operations to configure and manage storage infrastructure efficiently and cost-effectively.
What is HPE Primera?
HPE Primera is a high-end intelligent storage platform designed for mission-critical applications and delivered As-a-Service. It provides autonomous operations and extreme resiliency and performance, with the agility and scalability of the cloud.
Global intelligence
HPE Primera uses AI and ML, driven by the intelligence of HPE InfoSight, to optimise performance, capacity and availability for workloads within the storage environment in real-time. Over the past decade, this predictive analytics platform has analysed application patterns across more than 1250 trillion data points globally and applies ML to generate algorithms that can rapidly predict and prevent infrastructure disruptions before they occur. HPE InfoSight enables IT to facilitate workload planning and manage and troubleshoot any issues proactively. It also automates almost all support calls. Active capacity management ensures that a business’s storage infrastructure is geared to cope ahead of demand.
HPE Primera features an all-active multi-node architecture that enables limitless parallelisation and is designed for ultra-low latency at scale and mission-critical resiliency to ensure high performance. Advanced data services ensure business continuity, and HPE guarantees 100% availability—testimony to its performance and reliability.
Self-service user experience
HPE Primera’s unique operating system delivers a simple self-service user experience for instant access to data. According to HPE, it takes about 20 minutes for IT teams to deploy high-end storage themselves and just seconds to provision. HPE Primera tunes itself using all-active, always-on data reduction and RAID 6. It updates in seconds and can be upgraded without disrupting service. Each data service can be deployed, upgraded, and restarted independently of each other, reducing risk and eliminating node reboots for most updates.
Many organisations have adopted hybrid-cloud models and have workloads distributed across on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. HPE Primera extends data protection to the cloud enabling organisations to move data seamlessly across primary, secondary and private/public cloud environments in minutes.
Consumption-based storage
HPE GreenLake is a pay-per-use consumption-based model that delivers hardware, software, and expertise on-premises or in the cloud. HPE GreenLake has enabled businesses to combine the simplicity, flexibility and pay-per-use economics of the cloud with the security and control that on-premises infrastructure offers.
HPE GreenLake enables organisations to respond quickly and take advantage of new opportunities as there are no large upfront capital expenditures or lengthy procurement cycle delays. It provides a consumption-based payment model to align cash flow to actual usage.
iOCO and HPE work with businesses to determine the current and projected capacity requirements aligned to their workload needs. They will create a local buffer of IT resources that can be quickly scaled up or down as needed, ensuring economic storage utilisation. This improves capacity planning and reduces the risk of running out of capacity or over-provisioning, which wastes money, while metering technology ensures that companies only pay for what they use.
To learn more about the HPE Primera intelligent data platform or discuss how iOCO and HPE can help you transform your storage infrastructure, please contact our team of specialists.
By Mark Wayne, Head of Solutions at iOCO
- Burgener, E (2019). IDC White Paper – Why Organizations Need an Intelligent Data Strategy.