Management of your enterprise storage estate is costly, time-consuming, and IT team intensive. This makes enterprise storage infrastructure a perfect target for autonomous automation.
The immediate benefits are substantial cost savings and freeing up manpower resources for other tasks. A fully automated and autonomous storage platform provides dynamic, real-time management of data and storage, while dramatically lowering the need for operation manpower and operational expenses.
Autonomous automation had been thought to be something in the future by CIOs and VPs of Infrastructure, but that “future” can be implemented today.
Although parts of your existing infrastructure may already be automated or be “automation-ready,” you can unlock more potential with a fully automated and autonomous storage platform. It’s not enough to only have a solution that automates; it is important to have one that can autonomously automate.
If you don’t have one, then when a storage array goes down, you will likely need manual assistance. You should shore up this gap, getting your systems back online with as little human intervention as possible.
Virtually every IT executive is looking to automate at some level. Starting the autonomous automation of enterprise data and storage will catapult your organization forward and give you and your team valuable learnings and insights into the path of automation, which will only expand on the horizon.
Consolidation and security
Automation involves the simplification of your data center infrastructure by consolidating your storage environment. Imagine reducing your storage infrastructure from 50 storage arrays to 8 arrays with the same or higher capacity, the same or better high availability (look for solutions with a 100% availability guarantee), and the same or better performance, yet dramatically lowering your total cost of ownership. Fewer enterprise arrays mean less power, less floor space, less cooling, less rack space, less CAPEX, less OPEX, and less manpower.
After you simplify your data center with the consolidation of your storage deployment, having autonomous automation alleviates a significant burden from you of having to manage the storage infrastructure in conventional ways. Workloads, applications, and servers that direct load to that storage will experience storage that automatically, autonomously, and dynamically adjusts according to changing conditions.
If there is an event that causes a surge in data usage, the storage system adapts to it, ensuring availability, reliability, cyber resiliency, and performance. This happens most efficiently and optimally in an autonomously automated system.
Security is also part of the shift to autonomous automation in storage. Given the constant threat of cyberattacks, enterprise primary and secondary storage should be using immutable snapshots, essentially taking non-deletable and non-changeable photos of all the data at set intervals for back-up and cyber resilience purposes.
Beyond that, automated capabilities for logical air gapping, fenced forensic environments, and near-instantaneous recovery also add a dynamic dimension to securing the data and storage infrastructure without reliance on human intervention. And these can be automated even further with the use of data center/cloud automation platforms, such as the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Proliferation of data drives automation
Digital transformation and the exponential proliferation of data are creating a need for a new level of leadership and strategic management to oversee the shift to automation. By 2023, 75% of organizations will have comprehensive digital transformation (DX) implementation roadmaps, according to IDC.
By 2025, driven by volatile global conditions, 75% of business leaders will leverage digital platforms and ecosystem capabilities to adapt their value chains to new markets, industries, and ecosystems. By 2023, investment in Direct Digital Transformation will amount to $6.8 trillion, according to IORG. Data growth statistics show that by the end of 2022, over 70% of GDPs worldwide will have gone through digitalization. Automation needs to keep up with the astronomical expansion in data.
In a recent survey conducted by Qlik Research, 40% of C-level respondents said that their organizations plan to create a new role called “Chief Automation Officer” within the next three years, with the expectation of rising to nearly 100% over the next decade.
Chief Automation Officers will work alongside CIOs, CISOs, CHROs, and COOs to enable their organizations to deliver services, scale the business, and determine the right mix of human resources and automated capabilities. This expansion of the C-suite is a natural response to the widespread increase in the adoption of automation technologies over the past few years.
Get a quick win with long-term value
If you are still uncertain because of legacy thinking, it’s understandable. Most C-level executives do not even want to think about the data and storage infrastructure. They just want to know that applications will always be available and running, trusting that the storage capabilities will be robust, resilient, and available 100% of the time – just as Infinidat delivers to enterprise customers, including over 25% of the Fortune 50, every day.
But there are good reasons for CIOs to relook at storage from the perspective of autonomous automation. This is storage like you have never seen before. Innovation in the background has caused storage to catapult forward, creating new opportunities for you. Infinidat is at the forefront of it.
Automating while consolidating storage arrays is an opportunity for a CIO to obtain a quick, measurable “win.” The storage estate is one of the areas where enterprises can easily automate and substantially reduce costs without sacrificing application performance, availability, or cyber resilience. You are also showing that you’re evolving the organization in the direction that will define the future of business. Automating builds the organization’s competency and capabilities for the long term, while delivering immediate business benefits.
For more information, visit Infinidat here.
Data Management
Read More from This Article: Your Enterprise Storage Infrastructure: THE Perfect Target for Autonomous Automation
Source: News