When using the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform, you may find that you can afford more performance than you need. The ROI of affordable storage performance is IT can stop worrying about meeting the performance expectations of application owners and users. The affordable performance ROI also delivers the untold hours per day IT spends trying to improve application response time. Finally, enables IT to scale application environments further, increasing ROI throughout the data center. In short, you can never have too much performance.
StorONE’s TRUprice, transparent pricing tool enables you to configure and price a storage infrastructure to meet your needs, without registration. If you configure an all-flash array use case in TRUprice, almost all the capacity options will lead to a system that delivers hundreds of thousands of IOPS, and some of the higher capacity options will provide close to one million IOPS. These systems also offer unprecedented bandwidth and extremely low latency, while typically priced 60% less than our competitors’ prices. As a result more customers can afford more performance and the potential ROI of excess performance is substantial.
How can StorONE enable you to afford more performance than you need?
Our unique TRU storage algorithms can extract maximum performance from every drive in the system. In most cases, we can deliver 85% or more of manufacturers’ performance specifications for each drive. By comparison, most of our competitors produce less than 20% of the potential per drive performance. StorONE’s product manager Gal Turchinski provides a detailed look into maximum drive performance in his white paper “Reducing Storage Costs with Maximum Drive Performance.” Register to get your copy here.
The result of maximum drive performance is that our all-flash and hybrid storage system customers can focus primarily on meeting their capacity needs. They can then have full confidence that the configuration they selected, will in almost every case, deliver more performance than they will ever need. (By the way, the bandwidth capabilities of our HDD systems are also impressive.)
What Are the ROIs of Affordable Storage Performance?
ROI #1 Reduce Storage Costs, Now
Nothing can reduce storage costs faster than storage consolidation. It can reduce both CAPEX and OPEX costs dramatically. The problem is that storage consolidation is one of those IT projects that always looks good when drawn up on the whiteboard, but it rarely executes well in the real data center. There are plenty of reasons why consolidation strategies typically fail. Most of the storage solutions that claim to consolidate are built on proprietary hardware and are unnecessarily expensive. They also lack the efficiency required to deliver affordable performance.
We build our S1 Enterprise Storage Platform on a foundation of efficiency. We use affordable, midrange storage servers to run our software. The software supports file, block, and object protocols across a wide range of performance needs. Unlike other vendor’s attempts at consolidation, StorONE lets you run on the server and media hardware of your choice. You can literally by hardware off the shelf and avoid the price inflation associated when vendors place these components in a system.
S1 has the performance to simultaneously support VMware, Oracle, MS-SQL, and MySQL from the same storage hardware and meet all the expectations of application owners and users. It has the protocol support and cost-effectiveness to eliminate the need for silos often left out of consolidation efforts like backup and archive. With StorONE, IT can consolidate down to one system, with the performance and future-proofing that long term storage consolidation requires but has never seen.
Storage Consolidation is an ideal use case for a hybrid storage system, which can support both the high performance and high capacity data center needs. This article “Hybrid Instead of All-Flash”, discusses how you can use hybrid systems and not compromise performance or predictability.
ROI #2 Reduce Application Costs
Another ROI of affordable storage performance is IT has an opportunity to reduce the cost to run environments like Oracle, MS-SQL, MySQL, and VMware. All of these environments license by the amount of CPU power in place, typically per core. Most of the time, the CPU power and the network bandwidth in these environments go underutilized because they are always waiting on the storage infrastructure. With more performance than you need, developers can drive these environments harder, enabling them to support more VMs, more data, and more users, all while responding faster.
The cost savings of making the application environment work harder is significant. It means IT has to buy fewer servers, fewer network connections, and less software licensing, all because you are getting more from your storage infrastructure.
ROI #3 Be Future Proof
A final ROI of affordable storage performance is it is future proof. Most storage systems can’t even upgrade to respond to new challenges placed on them by the organization. The lack of flexibility is one reason there are so many various storage systems in a data center. Each use case or new application often requires a unique storage system.
StorONE’s S1 Storage Platform, especially in the all-flash configuration, but even in our hybrid configurations, is always ready for the next storage challenge, and usually without an upgrade needed. These configurations have more than enough performance to handle that upcoming workload or use case. Also, because we are a platform and not a system, the software supports multiple use cases out of the box, including block, file, and object. We have numerous customers that start using us in one environment, and then assign more and more workloads to S1.
Most of our customers only upgrade when they need more capacity because their current system already has more performance than they need. These capacity upgrades, in many cases, involve just adding additional drives or drive shelves and again use off-the-shelf components. Most of the time, the original storage servers can continue to deliver maximum performance.
Conclusion
When you can afford more performance than you need, your job as an IT professional becomes significantly easier. Your primary interaction with storage is when you need more capacity. No longer do you need to spend hours inside the storage console, figuring out what is causing a performance problem and how to fix it. Also, planning for the future becomes easier. You only need to make sure you have enough capacity, since you’ll have more than enough performance in most cases.
The S1 Enterprise Storage Platform enables you to afford more performance than you need and also delivers better data protection than you’ve experienced before. As a result, S1 covers all three legs of the storage infrastructure stool, affordability, performance, and reliability. No longer do you have to “pick two.”
To learn more about our data protection capabilities, register for our white paper “Reduce Backup Costs with Better Primary Storage.” With the same registration, you’ll also gain access to our live demonstration of these features.
Listen in as the architects of TRUprice, StorONE’s CEO, Gal Naor, and CMO, George Crump, discuss why and how they came up with the revolutionary, transparent pricing model for enterprise storage. They will also explain how, despite the low pricing, the S1 Enterprise Platform provides better performance and better data protection than the competition. George and Gal also take questions from the audience.
