In order for companies to be more agile in responding to changing customer needs and market dynamics, they must have a storage infrastructure that makes data available at the right time, at the right place and in the right format, so that they can derive value from it and turn raw data into insights that drive business outcomes. With the explosion of data and the increasing demands on that data, data centers must focus more on the data and the information that can be derived from it than the storage infrastructure that supports it. In the past when data centers were considered as cost centers, the efficiency of data centers were measured by how many TBs of capacity could be managed by one full time employee. Now data centers are measured on how fast they can drive innovation in delivering data, information, and applications.
However, the storage infrastructure, is still very important. It must support many more development platforms and applications, must scale quickly to meet demand, comply with increasing availability and governance requirements, span the breadth of requirements from edge, to core, to cloud, and seamlessly incorporate new technologies in order to be on the leading edge. So, the question is how does a data center maintain a leading-edge storage infrastructure when the focus needs to be on business outcomes?
Storage infrastructure workloads can be reduced through a shared services or a managed services approach.A storage service with automated tools for configuration management, analytics for optimization, and central management of copies, clones, replicas, and backup, can greatly reduce operations and personnel costs and improve efficiencies. This will help data centers free up more resources to focus on development and applications as they transform into an information technology driver for business transformation.
Buying storage as a service breaks the traditional buying cycle, where you over buy enough storage capacity for the next 5 years at today’s price and technology when you know that both the price and technology are likely to undergo major changes over those 5 years. If your capacity is100 TB today and growing at a 20% CAGR, you have just bought 250 TB for the next five years when you only needed 120 TB for the next year. What happens in year three when you find that the business requirements have changed, and you need more or less capacity, or the performance of your storage puts you at a disadvantage to competitors with newer technology storage? Storage as a service provides the agility to buy what you need when you need it and frees you up to respond to future business requirements such as support for big data initiatives, smart products and services. Storage as a service helps enterprises meet business goals with improved commercial viability, optimized and efficient data management
Hitachi Vantara has partnered with Cognizant Technology Solutions, a world leading professional services company to bring industry leading storage as a service (STaaS) solutions to small, medium and enterprise companies to facilitate the transition of their data center models for the digital era. The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform(VSP) scales from small to enterprise with enterprise ready software-defined storage, advanced global storage virtualization, and efficient workload consolidation. In addition to the VSP, Hitachi Vantara provides AI driven Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor to analyze and recommend improvements in operations, simplify budget forecasting and accelerate fault resolution, with Hitachi Automation Director to improve performance, avoid bottlenecks, and optimize end-to-end performance and resiliency, and Hitachi Data Instance Director to optimize data protection and copy data management.
The combination of Cognizant’s proven professional services leadership, bespoke solution designing, vertical business experience, deploying and managing large and complex storage infrastructure for customers coupled with Hitachi Vantara’s industry leading storage hardware and software solutions, will provide a new level of Storage Solutions that will enable sustainable IT transformation from Infrastructure to Information.
STaaS is an integrated software defined storage service that reduces cost, minimizes complexity, manages growth efficiently andhelps customers transition their storage environment securely from ‘Plugin-Migrate-Run-Retire’ model to consumption based ‘As-a-Service’ model