A recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research report discussed how purchasing storage for an IT organization is never an easy task, especially when trying to meet the needs of business units with dissimilar business objectives and technical storage requirements. A single storage system very rarely fits the bill for every department, leading to the need for IT departments to purchase, maintain, and administer multiple storage systems. Rarely do organizations take a step back and address all of their storage needs at once. As systems age, they are often replaced on a one-for-one basis, further perpetuating the management nightmare.
But it is certainly a goal of every business to do more with less and make investments in technologies that help to improve the bottom line of the business. It is no small surprise that a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research reveals that, along with security concerns, financial impacts such as return on investment, business process improvement, reduced capital and operational expenses, reduced time-to-market for products, and speed of payback were all identified as important considerations in justifying IT investments.
Consolidating mixed workloads on servers has proven to significantly improve all of these important metrics, and the ability to consolidate mixed workloads and functions onto a single all-flash-based storage system has proven to yield similar results as long as the performance, capacity, and operational requirements can be met. IT organizations and business decision makers should share the same financial vision. However, while many storage vendors offer all-flash solutions, the design decisions and trade-offs made by these vendors can result in very different system capabilities and ultimately trade-offs in economic benefits to the organization. It is in the best interest of every company to make wise investments in storage technologies that can help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) while also helping to make a positive impact in other areas of the business that help contribute to financial success.
ESG did a Lab Review documents hands-on testing of XtremIO all-flash storage and presented the findings of a five-year TCO analysis highlighting the economic benefits of XtremIO when compared with allflash implementations from other leading vendors.
From the report it was clear that EMC XtremIO is a true N-way active, multi-controller scale-out all-flash storage array that was designed from the ground up with a goal of leveraging flash technology to consolidate workloads and infrastructure to positively impact the bottom line of the business. XtremIO delivers high performance with consistent and predictable sub-ms latency, always-on data efficiency services, and integrated copy data management (iCDM), with an easy-to-use interface designed to streamline workflows and automate complex management tasks. With XtremIO’s scale-out architecture, IT organizations can start small and then linearly grow both performance and capacity, on demand, without any disruption to host applications.
ESG Lab created a five-year TCO analysis model that compared the storage-related costs that could be expected when deploying traditional hybrid storage arrays (dedicated flash and disk-based systems) to meet business requirements with the expected costs of a scenario in which the company chooses to deploy a consolidated solution on a single XtremIO X-Brick. ESG Lab also analysed some of the additional economic business advantages that would be realized when deploying XtremIO instead of a traditional storage system. All assumptions of XtremIO business benefits used in the model were validated for accuracy through real-world XtremIO customer testimonials. The results can be found in a comprehensive 18-page report available for download from the EMC website.
To view the report: https://africa.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/esg-lab-emc-xtremio-tco-analysis.pdf
