CTO’s today are always looking for ways to reduce operational and environmental costs. Good timing, because the IDC Research Storage Team just released an InfoBrief on the impact of Hyper-consolidation on EMC’s VMAX3. IDC validated that enterprises that consolidate their data service, data management and data intensive application infrastructure on VMAX3 can reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30% or more. This is because of the unique ability of VMAX3 and the HYPERMAX Operating System to connect and consolidate multiple infrastructure components, while provide enterprise data services for all the different services being managed.
Hyper-Consolidation in the Data Center
Quite simply, hyper-consolidation in the data center is the merging of strategic hardware and software onto a single, unified platform. This new platform acts as the conductor and orchestrator for all storage services, data services, and application services all managed under a single view. In the context of a private cloud, the costs savings are significant which directly reduce the cost of data storage. Enterprises continue to realize additional costs savings over time as additional services are integrated. IDC points out that, over time, enterprises can look towards reduced infrastructure costs, downtime, operating costs and $/GB with the benefit of improved staff productivity.
Storage Infrastructure Savings
IDC validated a detailed cost analysis of storage infrastructure costs and identifies three areas with the most dramatic costs savings: Data Access, Storage Management and Enterprise-wide Storage Consolidation. Because of the industry-leading scale, agility and performance of VMAX3, the costs savings don’t just end at storage, but also include significant physical and environmental savings. Floor tile density, weight, cooling and power all significantly add to the overall costs savings. And because of HYPERMAX OS’s ability to handle File, Object and Block an overall streamlined process of installing and managing storage all contribute to additional cost savings.
Data Services Savings
A significant call-out to the costs savings of Data Services is highlighted by the IDC Research Storage Team. They’ve identified that by embedding strategic data services (Availability, Data Mobility and Data Protection) into a hyper-consolidated platform, enterprise IT organizations can simplify their operational and disaster recovery infrastructure. On VMAX3, this is all enabled, once again, by granting these services access to HYPERMAX OS. The brief drills down into costs savings specific to data availability, mobility and protection and the savings impact on performance, operational/environmental/physical savings costs. A specific deep-dive is done on the implementation of EMC’s ProtectPoint on VMAX3. EMC ProtectPoint enables direct backup of VMAX3 to EMC Data Domain, delivering 10X faster backups with real-world financials calculating a reduction in data protection infrastructure spend by 38%.
Key Application Services
HYPERMAX OS is highlighted as the breakthrough technology underpinning VMAX3s ability to potentially offload “data hungry” applications. VMAX3 delivers application services consolidation by moving these workloads closer to where the data resides allowing them to run more efficiently. IDC specifically identifies these “data hungry” applications which include IT Operational Analytics & Intelligence, eDiscovery/Governance, Risk, Compliance, End-user access and Collaboration applications, Performance Management Tools and Enterprise Databases. The white paper outlines the overall TCO savings demonstrating lower $/GB at higher scale, reduced number of copies of data and reduced data movement. Ratings are assigned for each category and are assigned an overall net positive impact on the cost savings.
IDC has validated that IT organizations can reduce the TCO of their storage infrastructure by 30% or more by hyper-consolidating on VMAX3. To learn more, I invite you to download the IDC InfoBrief, “Validating Hyperconsolidation Savings with VMAX3,” HERE. To learn more about EMC VMAX3, visit the solution page on EMC.COM.