Mixing Flash, SSDs And FAST Software For Automated Storage [EMC]

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that 20% of the people owned 80% of the wealth. If you think about it, that 80/20 rule applies to just about everything. Likely you wear 20% of the clothes in your closet 80% of the time, and I bet that only 20% of your company’s data is active 80% of the time.

Even though you may have spent a small fortune of your company’s money on a storage array, 80% of that array goes mostly unused. While that kind of statistic is expensive to hear, there is a solution – automated storage tiering.

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An Overview Of The Top 3 Converged Infrastructure Offerings

Even with the latest infrastructure technology, IT departments must continue to support applications running in both bare-metal and virtualized environments. This causes a few problems for IT managers including:

  1. Staggering growth means complex infrastructures need to become more efficient to adapt dynamically to workload demands and use servers, storage, networking and power optimally.
  2. Manual assembly requires time consuming, error-prone support for every step from server refresh to cloud computing for siloed, hierarchical, point-to-point infrastructures.
  3. Multiple switching layers and fragmented management tools make it difficult to observe, manage, debug network traffic and support the latest applications that can leverage on-premise, private cloud and off-premise resources.
  4. Administrator productivity suffers when rushed to configure new servers to keep up with scale. Also, operations often take up more time than is spent on strategic planning.

Before you rip-and-replace, have you considered a converged infrastructure?

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7 Reasons Gen8 Servers Actually Make a Difference [HP]

Jumbo jets have autopilot so advanced that they can take off or land a plane full of passengers on their own. Why does it work so well and why is it so reliable? Because it’s completely integrated with the critical systems of the plane, and it’s been tested over and over again.

Unfortunately, most data centers today are a patchwork of components that you have to manually integrate so they work together. It’s likely your SAN, network, and servers are all from different companies and each have their own management software. You and your admins struggle to learn how the multitude of complex pieces even function. Worse yet, the data center data and compute requirements continue to grow. Something has to change.

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