Speed is only one imperative in remaining relevant in the market. Once you build an infrastructure that enables data to move faster and more seamlessly, you also unlock the keys to ensuring you remain competitive.
To keep up with today’s high-performance servers supporting hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual workloads and critical business applications, today’s system design and next generation data centers will require data infrastructure that can transfer data in better ways. One of these evolutions that’s happening right now is NVMe™ – taking enterprise storage from a slow two-lane country road powered by SAS and SATA to a fast 12-lane divided highway driven by Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) – to deliver the infrastructure your business needs to stay relevant.
Fast Data is Not Just About Speed
Speed is only one imperative in remaining relevant. Once you build an infrastructure that enables data to move faster and more seamlessly, you also unlock the keys to not only remaining relevant, but ensuring you remain competitive, including:
- Timely Insights – Fast data provide timely insights and real-time monitoring for forecasting events that have the potential to impact business performance. The ability to access this type of data is extremely important for improving processes and reducing risk.
- Workload Acceleration – Fast data applications utilize advanced storage technology to solve problems that help optimize results. With data at their fingertips, IT departments can help business leaders connect the dots and interpret the statistics needed to make informed decisions.
- Data-Centric Management – Fast data storage provide a tangible platform for employees to evaluate and improve their job performance through timely updates and streamlined analytics. IT professionals can use both forms of data to help employees stay informed about business analytics and evaluate the quality of their performance.
Faster Data Processing Increases Business Value
It wasn’t that long ago that flash storage solutions, such as NVMe, were considered niche products that supported specialized applications. Enterprises originally embraced flash storage to help drive breakthrough ideas that would ultimately transform their business. Over time, flash storage solutions have become the standard for most primary applications, driving a dramatically higher return on investment (ROI) on capital investments, new product launches, advertising spend and effectiveness, business process improvements, and more.
It likely will not come as a surprise, but when you shift your infrastructure from that two-lane country road, mentioned above, to a 12-lane divided highway driven by NVMe, you are bound to improve ROI. With an infrastructure built with NVMe storage solutions, organizations can reduce the time it takes to process and analyze data, allowing them to more quickly analyze trends, track project progress, generate reports, forecast costs, and conduct competitive analysis, to name just a few applications.
What Does this Mean for My Data Center?
You may have read a blog from my colleague, Erik Ottem, that 2019 is the year of NVMe. If you have not gotten to check it out, it’s a great post to learn more about the adoption of NVMe technology. There are different approaches to how you can implement NVMe and due to the nature of upgrading technology each comes with different benefits as well as obstacles.
As Erik mentions in the post, “The great thing about NVMe storage systems is that they can be implemented without a specialized networking infrastructure — traditional Ethernet or Fibre Channel connectivity will do. No changes are required to the application, your existing file or block applications will work just fine.”
This is the reason I get very excited when helping customers adopt our IntelliFlash™ N-series NVMe system. They benefit from the power of NVMe today, without needing to make any changes to existing applications. And the results they see are phenomenal – for their workload, for their productivity, for new opportunities and applications, and even costs savings.
When considering the economic value, there’s a great report that we commissioned – the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study –which examines the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying IntelliFlash Enterprise Flash Storage. This is a helpful framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of IntelliFlash through real customer results that can help define the costs, benefits, and ROI, so you can make a better decision on the value for your organization.
The Business Impact of NVMe – Next Steps
Want to learn more about the business impact of NVMe and how to make the right decision for your enterprise storage infrastructure? Please join me on April 10 at 10am PDT for a webinar where I’ll share my thoughts on this topic and more information on IntelliFlash, including information about the TEI study. And, I welcome you to share in the comments any questions you might want me to answer during the webinar.
