Why Storage Modernisation And Why Now?
For SMBs, the pressure to modernise how they use storage comes in many forms.
First, traditional storage models have onerous processes such as load balancing and painful forklift upgrades every few years. Not only does this pose a huge IT upgrade management problem, it also means a major distraction from the projects that would keep the business moving forward.
Consider also that organisations of all sizes are finding it even harder to retain skilled IT people. And that means bottom-up pressure to take people off the dull “keep-the-lights-on” routine functions.
Next up, the evergreen challenge that data continues to grow exponentially, with no end in sight. A good thing given that unstructured data is increasingly important in creating differentiated customer and employee experiences, but where should all that data be kept?
Finally, a critical reason to explore modernisation now is because of the advances that have taken place in storage technologies and solutions. If you are still using storage from the previous generation, your organization is missing out on major IT advantages that many of your competitors are likely using.
Over recent years, there have been major innovations in storage solutions. The latest solutions can enhance flexibility, increase security, improve performance, and reduce complexity.
What To Look for in a Solution
Not all modern storage solutions are created the same. While you weigh-up across potential solutions, here are some of the key features and capabilities that we at Bell Integration see our clients looking for:
Future-ready – IT and business leaders want to protect their investments to avoid major upgrades every few years. With a modern storage solution, you should be able to achieve data-in-place upgrades without the downtime and without impacting application performance or availability. You can always stay current with the latest advances in storage technology and have a cloud-ready infrastructure.
Built-in Security – With the increase in security threats, particularly ransomware, built-in data-at-rest encryption is essential. Encryption can be performed within each drive before the data is written to the media, protecting the data against theft or loss and attempts to read the drive directly. It also provides a means to erase information quickly and securely on a drive to ensure that the data is not recoverable.
Intelligence-Based Management for Planning and Operations – Your next storage solution should be easily accessible and provide warnings of the potential problems, meaning they can be addressed before they impact performance or availability. Increasingly, IT teams are looking to save time and money by using a cloud-based platform that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to do the monitoring, planning, optimization, and other management activities. It also benefits your IT people by significantly cutting out dull repetitive duties.
Flexible IT – Flexible IT means a data-centric solution that supports traditional and modern workloads, with scale-up and scale-out agility. The ability to accommodate application, multi-protocol network and multi-format storage diversity within a single appliance helps you simplify and consolidate infrastructure.
Why Bell Integration
When it comes to moving your organisation forward, it is important to remember that data is strategic, but storage is not. Even with an advanced solution such as the Dell PowerStore, SMB’s can achieve huge benefits by working with Bell Integration because of our 25 years heritage in IT modernisation and future-ready solutions.
We provide SMBs with:
