The challenge of managing enterprise storage in a hybrid world

As enterprises and IT departments are being asked to do more with less, many are casting a critical eye over their storage costs. That dovetails with the recent growing debate about repatriating workloads to on-premises infrastructure – driven by cloud spending exceeding original estimates.

However, in reality only 8%-9% of organisations are planning full workload repatriation from the cloud to on-premises infrastructure, according to IDC’s Server and Storage Workloads Survey.

For the vast majority, the future remains hybrid. “Two big trends continue to drive the hybrid approach to enterprise storage,” says Chris Dedmon, supplier manager at Arrow Electronics. “The first is the simplified management that comes with abstracting away from hardware into the cloud, which continues to grow in popularity. The second is the continuing need to rightsize your storage capacity.”

Navigating the complexities of hybrid storage

The advantages of Storage-as-a-service (STaaS) have become familiar. Organisations pay for what they use, acquiring the ability to dial usage up and down as required. Users also avoid the upfront cost of hardware, software, provisioning and in many cases, staff. In accounting and budgetary terms, subscriptions can be easier to absorb than lumpy capex investment cycles, which also tend to encourage over-provisioning at the start of every three-year investment cycle. The balancing negative factor is the tendency for subscription costs to outstrip the cost of a one-off capex-based purchase in the long run.

By contrast, investing in traditional CapEx-based on-premises storage offers its own value proposition. Organisations adopting this approach for relevant workloads, including those impacted by governance and compliance concerns, largely avoid the potential for month-to-month variations in cost and egress fees. Users employing storage specialists in-house retain valuable skills and experience. They also reduce the risks of CSP lock-in.

Many enterprises exploit both strategies. For organisations that choose this path, the key challenge involves managing both approaches across multi-cloud as well as virtualized or containerized environments operating on-premises.

Bringing cloud and on-prem closer than ever

NetApp has a reputation for focusing on the challenge of managing storage in hybrid cloud environments. NetApp’s latest offering, Keystone, updates the proposition by delivering on-premises storage as well as cloud storage as-a-service with a single, pay-as-you-go subscription. Keystone allows enterprises to:

Keystone allows enterprises to maximise the advantages of both approaches, including opex payment terms, operational flexibility and the ability to choose between customer-managed on-premises storage and a partner-managed option. Either way, NetApp’s characteristic ease-of-use, end-to-end observability and industry-leading data protection and security offerings remain in place.

Mastering the complexity

Keystone draws on NetApp’s long heritage as an industry leader, focused on enabling enterprises to master the complexities of hybrid and multicloud data infrastructure management. This flexible hybrid storage solution will strike many enterprises as a solution that blends the best of on-premises storage with the best of the cloud alternative.

Learn more here about how NetApp can improve your business and its availability via Arrow ECS in the UK.