Digital Transformation is drastically changing the business landscape, and the effects are being felt in every industry, and every region of the world. For some, the goal of this transformation is to use technology to leapfrog the competition by offering innovative products and services. For others, the focus is on avoiding disruption from new market entrants. Whatever your situation might be, it’s clear that you can’t ignore the change. In a recent study by Dell Technologies, 78% of global businesses surveyed believe that digital start-ups will pose a threat to their organization, while almost half (45%) fear they may become obsolete in the next three to five years due to competition from digital-born start-ups. These numbers are a stark indication of the pressure that business leaders are feeling to adapt or fall by the wayside.
But for IT leaders, this raises an uncomfortable question: Where will you find the money to make this transformation? You’re already under constant pressure to lower IT costs. How can you invest in new technologies while still doing this?
Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), Dell’s object storage platform, was built to help organizations with precisely this challenge. After being in market for just under two years, the latest release, ECS 3.0 is being announced at Dell World today. ECS is a next-generation storage platform that simplifies storage and management of your unstructured data, increases your agility, and most importantly, lowers your costs. Let’s take a look at some of the ways ECS can help modernize your datacenter, clearing the way for you to embrace Digital Transformation.
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Simplify and Accelerate Cloud-Native Development
The success of companies like Uber and AirBnB has highlighted the transformative power of “cloud native” mobile and web apps. Enterprises everywhere are taking note – in the previously mentioned Dell Technologies survey, 72% of companies indicated that they are expanding their software development capabilities. Often, these software development efforts are directed towards “cloud-native” applications designed for the web and mobile devices.
ECS is designed for cloud-native applications that utilize the S3 protocol (or other REST-based APIs like OpenStack Swift). ECS natively performs many functions like geo-distribution, ensuring strong data consistency and data protection, freeing up application developers to focus on what moves their business forward. This greatly increases developer productivity, and reduces the time to market for new applications that can unlock greater customer satisfaction, as well as new sources of revenue.
Reduce storage TCO and complexity
Legacy storage systems that sit in most enterprise datacenters are struggling to keep up with the explosion in unstructured data. Primary storage platforms are constantly running out of capacity, and it is expensive to store infrequently accessed data on these platforms. Additionally, as many businesses operate on a global scale, data coming in from different corners of the world ends up forming silos, which increase management complexity and lower agility in responding to business needs.
ECS is compatible with a wide range of cloud-enabled tiering solutions for Dell primary storage resources like VMAX, VNX, Isilon and Data Domain. Additionally, ECS is certified on many 3rd party tiering solutions, which enable it to act as a low cost, global cloud-tier for 3rd party storage platforms. These solutions drive up primary storage efficiency and drive down cost by accessing a lower cost tier with ECS. Tiering to ECS is friction-free, which means that apps or users accessing primary storage don’t have to change any behavior at all.
Tape Replacement
The new ECS dense compute rack D-series increases storage density by more than 60%, making it an ideal replacement for tape archives. The D-Series comes as an eight node system that provides the highest density configurations for ECS at 4.5PB (D-4500) and 6.2PB (D-6200) in a single rack.
These new configurations provide the low cost and scalability benefits of traditional tape solutions, but without the lack of agility, poor reliability, and operational difficulties associated with storing data on tape. Additionally, ECS makes business data available to BUs in an on-demand fashion. This allows organizations to fully embrace Digital Transformation, which relies on insights mined from business data to create more compelling experiences for customers.
Legacy application modernization
ECS can serve as an ideal storage platform for organizations looking to modernize legacy LoB applications that utilize or generate a large amount of unstructured data. Modifying legacy apps to point to ECS using the S3 (or other REST-based APIs like OpenStack Swift) protocol can help reduce costs, simplify maintenance of the application, and allow them to scale to handle massive amounts of data.
Take the Next Step
Learn more about how ECS can enable your transformation , follow @DellECS on Twitter, or try it out – for free!
