The IT industry is in the midst of a storage cost crisis. This is
largely due to the pace of change and innovation in enterprise computing
during the last decade, which has created enormous pressure on the
underlying data storage infrastructure. In the last few years alone,
there has been an average enterprise data growth of 569%, with an
evolution of organizations managing an average of 1.45 PB of data in
2016 to 9.7 PB in 2018.
To keep up with this change, IT teams have rapidly expanded storage
capacity, added expensive new storage arrays to their environment, and
deployed a range of disparate point solutions.
However, despite representing a significant percentage of IT budgets,
the storage layer has remained particularly problematic and continues
to be the root of many IT challenges, including the inability to keep up
with rapid data growth rates, vendor lock-in, lack of
interoperability-and most significantly, increasing hardware costs.
Given that IT teams cannot continue to simply outspend the problem, it
has become clear that a more fundamental solution is required to address
the cost and complexity issues of the storage infrastructure.
Software-Defined Storage Emerges as a Key Solution
As IT architects and decision-makers look for ways to effectively address this challenge, software-defined storage
(SDS) is increasingly being recognized as a viable solution for the
short and long term. The potential economic impact of software-defined
storage is best understood in the context of the complexity and cost
crisis that characterizes most enterprise IT environments today,
including:
- Hardware and Software Costs: The enterprise storage
environment often contains many specialized products, built with
proprietary technology. To meet all of the enterprise requirements,
while accounting for both capacity growth of existing workloads and the
addition of new workloads, IT teams have had to devote significant
portions of their annual budget to these capital expenditures (CAPEX).
Year over year growth in data, applications supported, number of users,
and number of sites all drive further CAPEX spending-and that's just to
maintain the status quo.
- Operating Expenses (OPEX) and the Inability to Innovate:
Infrastructure complexity also consumes significant manpower. This
complexity increases with variables including storage arrays, vendors,
locations, applications, and operating systems. The volume of activities
required to keep the existing infrastructure available and working as
expected means that the majority of the IT staff's time goes to simply
maintaining the infrastructure, leaving a much smaller percentage of
time to dedicate toward innovation or new programs that can enable
growth and differentiation for the business.
Users of DataCore software-defined storage typically experience
significant OPEX and CAPEX savings, yielding a superior total cost of
ownership (TCO) due to the strength of its architecture, including a
number of innovations that directly reduce the cost of a robust storage
environment. With DataCore, customers can avoid or reduce new storage
purchases by extending the life of existing storage, purchase less
extensive storage without sacrificing performance or functionality, and
can make more efficient use of existing capacity. Moreover, DataCore
software-defined storage drives significant operational savings based on
reduced complexity, improved uptime, lower maintenance cost, lower data
center costs, and other indirect factors.
Conducting a TCO evaluation of all potential solutions is an
important step in making any IT purchasing decision. This is
particularly true for data storage, one of the most critical pieces of
the overall data center infrastructure. If you are interested in
learning more about how software-defined storage can help reduce data
center infrastructure costs, including a table to help you structure
your TCO analysis comparison, download this white paper.