Corral your growing storage infrastructure!
A changing IT ecosystem
Businesses today are measured by their ability to meet customer demand for anytime/anywhere products and services. Technologies such as cloud, mobility, social media, cognitive/AI, the Internet of Things and virtual reality are creating new business performance benchmarks and generating an explosion of data. To deliver competitive advantage in the marketplace, organizations must harness the power of data to enhance customer interactions, provide new services or create new technologies.
But, having data that you cannot access within an acceptable timeframe is akin to not having data at all. And, you can’t keep starting over. Many organizations have already made huge investments in servers and storage. If your existing IT infrastructure still has investment or material value, data elasticity supported on diverse (and often legacy) platforms is a basic requirement. Companies also need to understand when equipment has exceeded its lifespan or no longer provides an advantage. Capacity management, access management and storage tiers must support and accelerate business insights.
To succeed, businesses need strategies for infrastructure efficiency, particularly when it comes to data storage.
How to optimize storage for the future
IBM Systems Lab Services has designed a Storage Infrastructure Optimization (SIO) offering to give IT and business leaders the insight needed to improve efficiency and develop highly available systems. SIO is a set of comprehensive assessments that use IBM methodologies and capabilities to identify optimization opportunities within your storage infrastructure.
SIO provides techniques that can help you:
- Increase agility and reduce costs by modernizing the storage infrastructure
- Improve management and control of heterogeneous environments
- Utilize new technology to support modern workloads
- Align technology to business requirements for high performance
- Improve utilization to eliminate storage waste
- Reduce complexity to simplify storage management
- Improve resiliency and access to data in the event of an outage
SIO utilizes a modular approach and employs the IBM Design Thinking methodology so that businesses can focus on areas that best suit their environment and challenges in an expedient timeframe. The five core SIO modules are shown in the following table:
You’ll be in trusted hands
The SIO offering is delivered by experienced consultants from IBM Systems Lab Services – Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure who work with you to understand your storage goals and strategies, collecting empirical data for analysis using IBM-developed modeling tools. As part of the optimization, IBM Systems Lab Services facilitates a collaborative workshop that creates a shared understanding of your current environment, assesses impediments to future success, shares IBM experience based on work with thousands of clients with similar environments and creates technology roadmaps to address your requirements.
SIO engagements provide tactical and strategic recommendations for improvements to your storage infrastructure, along with the business justification to proceed, enabling you to address anytime/anywhere data requirements and deliver the right storage capacity for current and upcoming workloads while leading the charge to address future storage needs for your company.
For more information on optimizing your storage infrastructure, contact IBM Systems Lab Services today.