The storage industry is constantly evolving and organizations have many options to choose from varying from traditional spinning disk, solid state storage, flash storage and more. What each organization chooses to do in his space can vary, and often involves some form of a combination of disk types. In the recent past flash storage is getting a lot of interest. With the performance of flash storage, many organizations and not only considering flash storage, but are also rapidly adopting this type of technology for their storage needs for their primary datacenters.
What about the Remote Office?
When designing our storage we often focus on the primary site and datacenter. However, depending on the geographics of your organization and your infrastructure design it is entirely possibly that your users would greatly benefit from a secondary datacenter or offsite servers/storage for your computing needs. The challenge often becomes that the cost of most storage solutions won’t fit the budget for those smaller sites. So organizations may choose product options that aren’t enterprise grade, or do not offer the remote site computing due to budget constraints.
Are there ALL flash storage options for the remote site?
Atlantis has now added a new product that helps meet the needs of the remote office. It is the CX-4 appliance and runs on Dell Hardware. This is a two-node hyperconverged system with compute, all-flash storage, redundant networking and will work with your hypervisor. The offering is also scalable and can grown for organizational needs. In my opinion, this offering is valuable to their strategy, because it allows customers that are looking for enterprise level storage for their remote sites an option that provides exceptional performance. Over time I have seen many organizations functioning on more of a centralized single datacenter methodology even when there are multiple remote sites. Typically done to avoid the cost and support of remote storage. In other situations I have seen organizations invest in their remote sites, but do so on a dime. In these cases they were likely sacrificing some level of product quality or support, and in the end not meeting the needs of the business.
Innovation
IT is continually evolving and storage performance is one of the primary infrastructure components that can ensure that our business functions smoothly. While application performance isn’t solely dependent on the performance of your underlying disk it’s impact is great. Choosing storage solutions that support your business will contribute to the long-term success of business functionality. Allowing your users to do their jobs well without worrying about the infrastructure solution implemented.