Minimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and maximizing the uptime of storage infrastructure has never been more important. More data is being captured and utilized by the business, and a new tier of premium-priced non-volatile memory express (NVMe) arrays is entering the equation. Meanwhile, storage environments are becoming more fragmented and distributed. Storage professionals are faced with the challenge of learning a number of new management tools, and they must manage a suite of storage infrastructures that are spread out across offices globally. At the same time, the role of the storage professional is shifting from one centered on troubleshooting, remediation, and day-to-day management, to becoming a more strategic business partner.
In summation, storage infrastructure has become too complex, it is too fluid, and time is too tight, for storage managers to remain in the weeds as they have been. Increasingly, it has become necessary to be able to “scale” the storage management team across a larger infrastructure environment, in favor of enabling storage professionals to free up time to devote to more directly supporting key corporate initiatives.
To achieve this goal, storage professionals should look for a management solution that applies analytics and machine learning (ML) to storage system telemetry data. Not only can this help to more quickly uncover and react to issues in the storage environment in real time – it can also help to identify forthcoming issues and respond before they impact the production environment. For example, a storage vendor may aggregate telemetry data from systems deployed across customers’ environments to predict an upcoming system failure. In this example, the vendor could proactively call the client, to alert them of the pending issue and how to remediate it.
George Crump, Storage Switzerland Founder and Lead Analyst, was joined by Veena Joshi, a product manager with Western Digital, for a Lightboard Video discussion about the impact that an intelligent approach to storage management can have on IT professionals and the business alike. As discussed in the video, it is important for storage managers to understand what data their vendor is capturing specifically, how frequently that data is being captured, and also how that data is being used. Along this vein, storage professionals should look for compliance with best practices for data privacy, and they should also look for third party assessment and analysis of security.
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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