Drones. Quadcopters. Small remote-controlled flying vehicles. Whatever you want to call them, they were THE hot item this holiday season. I had two orders cancelled by Amazon once they determined they were accepting orders beyond inventory capacity. It was a miracle I was finally able to find one for my son at a local store.
As an 11 year old, my son was initially challenged with the vehicle controls. The controller had 2 joysticks, 2 elevation buttons, a start button, a “trick” button, trim/elevation/turning fine-tuning buttons, takeoff and landing buttons and a LCD display. And learning how to manage the vehicle occurred only after he had manually built much of the tiny aircraft. That’s a lot for anyone to accomplish in short time before they can get value (fun!) out of it. And even then, I still needed to be in the flight area to protect pictures, lamps and the cats from being hit.
There’s a striking similarity between my son’s recent drone experience and using converged infrastructure to deliver simpler IT. The goal of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure is to focus your resources on business innovations instead of building and managing infrastructure. IDC found converged infrastructure customers achieve 4.6 x more applications deployed, 96% reduction in downtime, 4.4x faster app delivery and 41% less time keeping the light on. In other words, you would spend less time building and managing infrastructure and more time (having fun) running the business. In the case of my son’s drone experience, more flight time.
Those are amazing statistics as long as you remember one critical component to any converged system – all data and applications need to be protected regardless of where they live, against whatever might happen, and at the right service level based on business value. In short, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure systems require data protection. Supporting this statement, according to a June 2016 survey of 2200 IT decision makers across 18 countries in Dell’s 2nd Global Data Protection Index, 83% of survey respondents said data protection is a mandatory or very important criterion when selecting a converged infrastructure solution.
Data protection is so important to converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that Dell’s VxRail Appliance comes with data backup and replication capabilities built into every appliance. And given the vital importance of protecting your applications and data, customers can optimize data protection for VxRail to simplify and scale complete data protection for their VMware environments.
At VMWorld in August, Dell announced VxRail Appliance customers could expand on its built-in protection capabilities and leverage a wider range of data protection products, including Dell Data Domain Virtual Edition, which provides scalable protection storage and cloud enablement, as well as 50% faster backups when used alongside Dell Data Protection Suite for VMware. The combination of Data Protection Suite for VMware and Data Domain Virtual Edition offers simplified management, up to 30x faster recoveries than traditional image backups, up to a 38x reduction in backup storage utilization, and up to 95% less network traffic. I’ve blogged about the benefits of optimizing data protection for VxRail before – you can read those posts here and here.
And there’s more to the data protection for converged infrastructure story than just VxRail. Dell also offers Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack converged infrastructure solutions. For each, Dell delivers data protection solutions that are simple, flexible and complete, and the system arrives fully assembled and pre-validated. You can choose from a wide range of data protection solutions to meet the unique requirements of each of your business applications. Whether you need cost-effective daily backups, continuous data protection for any point-in-time recovery, or continuous data availability and data mobility, Dell offers solutions to meet your business needs.
At the end of the day, your job is to drive business innovations and deliver results. Make sure you’re getting the business “flight time” you expect. Data can live anywhere so you have to protect it everywhere. You can spend less time building and managing your IT infrastructure AND ensuring your applications and data are properly protected with Dell converged infrastructure and integrated Dell data protection solutions.
