Understanding storage performance is a significant factor in determining the efficiency and longevity of an organization’s infrastructure. In today’s data-driven world, your storage architecture must be able to store, protect and manage all sources and types of data while scaling to manage the exponential growth of data created by IoT, videos, photos, files, and apps. The growth of data won’t stop anytime soon, so it’s important that your storage system can handle more data in less time. Below are four ways you give your storage architecture the boost it needs to meet the data requirements of the future.
1. Use NVMe to boost storage performance
With all-flash storage, you can unlock the power of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), a protocol that’s bringing many advantages to data-driven businesses due to its ability to access high-speed storage media compared to legacy protocols.
NVMe can handle highly demanding and compute-intensive workloads with a smaller infrastructure footprint. Flash storage and NVMe remove bottlenecks from workloads across the data center. The speed of all-flash storage arrays provides an edge in data processing, and the technology makes sharing, accessing, moving, and protecting data across applications simpler and quicker. Leveraging these modern architectures also simplifies the delivery of storage performance from business-critical applications to DevOps.
2. Optimize network performance
While adopting flash storage delivers immediate value to the business by handling mission-critical workloads with extreme performance, flash storage by itself won’t necessarily improve data storage efficiency. Before adding flash storage to an existing system, you should maximize the capability of your storage network.
Optimizing your network performance can improve your storage efficiency. By eliminating network bottlenecks, your critical processes can work faster. The less latency on your storage networks, the faster your storage can act on requests. Latency touches every layer of the storage environment, from servers and compute components to storage media and software. When you optimize your network performance, you contribute to the overall health of your IT infrastructure, and by achieving operational efficiency you can enable business growth and deliver value to your customers.
3. Leverage cloud in the hybrid model
Storage solutions must be agile, and that’s why many organizations are adopting hybrid cloud solutions to accommodate changes in application and data growth. With a hybrid cloud model, you can store data as you see fit, move easily between public and private clouds, maximize control and security, and alter capacity on-demand to meet capacity in real-time. This helps companies accelerate time to market and easily deploy and manage their environments.
Hybrid cloud continues to help organizations gain cost-effectiveness and increase data mobility between on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud without compromising data integrity. With a multi-cloud strategy, organizations get the flexibility to collect, segregate and store data whether it’s on- or off-premises. This helps them accelerate time to market and easily deploy and manage their environments. But every business has unique requirements for hosting its applications, so understand the requirements first before choosing the cloud data storage architecture for your application.
4. Rely on data classification
Reliable data classification helps protect and control the use of your data. The practice of organizing data into defined categories simplifies the process of locating and retrieving information, making it easier to use and protect. Data classification helps organizations answer important questions about their data that inform how they mitigate risk and manage data governance policies. In the event you must recover after a cyberattack, the more you know your data, the faster recovery can take place. By classifying your data, you can ensure that you’re running it on the right platforms to meet your SLAs.
Get expert help to improve storage efficiency and increase agility
As your organization moves along its journey of digital transformation, your infrastructure needs to keep pace with new rules and challenges of the digital economy. At Sirius, we help clients achieve their business outcomes by accelerating their digital transformation journey. If you want to improve your storage performance to increase agility and drive innovation and growth, contact a Sirius representative today. We can work with you every step of the way to accommodate your data requirements so you can keep pace with the new challenges in a data-driven world.
