Discover how to promote the benefits of Flash storage – and help your customers achieve better results faster.
In the second of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we look at how Flash storage has the ability to accelerate IT Transformation.
When it comes to speaking to your customers about embracing the need for IT Transformation, deciding to modernize their storage environment by incorporating All-Flash arrays is one of the most high-impact actions they can take.
Why is that? Because All-Flash storage offers lower latency and greater IOPS per drive compared with legacy spinning disk. That dramatically accelerates the speed and efficiency of the applications it supports, extending advantages well beyond the IT department and out to the whole business.
There are other benefits too: All-Flash storage enables your customers to consolidate workloads, shrink hardware footprints, reduce power consumption and also lower management costs. Of course,
Flash storage also works well with modern, feature-rich architectures and software solutions—which helps companies better address their workload-specific needs in dynamically changing IT environments.
With all that in mind, have you got customers who still haven’t considered the merits of smarter storage? If so, you certainly won’t be alone—but it’s a massive opportunity for you to explore.
Flash users report significant cost savings
One of the main reasons that Flash storage hasn’t already entirely eclipsed legacy HDDs is that, rightly or wrongly, it has been typically thought to be expensive. That’s clearly for individual organizations to decide when you promote Flash storage to them, but the ROI is certainly impressive.
In a recent research study1 commissioned by Dell, ESG found that Flash users enjoyed a significant average reduction in both their storage OpEx (driven by lower power, cooling and reduced infrastructure sprawl) and CapEx (driven by workload consolidation and dramatic savings delivered by deduplication and compression):
- 25% reduction in storage OpEx
- 24% reduction in storage CapEx
The same study also revealed that users of Flash storage reported a significant benefit in terms of improved application performance. On average, performance improvements were reported as:
- 36% performance improvement among Flash users
- 49% performance improvement among users relying entirely on All-Flash arrays
Flash storage supports and accelerates IT Transformation
The other factor that’s not in doubt is the ability of Flash storage to accelerate IT Transformation.
Earlier this year, ESG conducted a survey of 4,000 IT executives from private- and public-sector organizations across 16 countries to evaluate their progress in embracing IT Transformation2—and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.
A full 99% of the organizations that achieved ‘Transformed’ status are happily leveraging Flash storage – with 69% of the surveyed companies taking a step towards that by deploying one or more All-Flash arrays.
In stark comparison, 85% of the ‘Legacy’ organizations haven’t yet deployed any Flash media at all.
Improved results enhance competitive advantage
Taking a closer look at the benefits enjoyed by ‘Transformed’ organizations, ESG1 identified that companies using Flash, particularly All-Flash:
- Were 3.5X as likely to make better, faster, data-driven decisions than their competitors (22% versus 6%)
- Were 2X more likely to execute most application deployments ahead of schedule (28% versus 15%)
- Were greater than 2X more likely to have made excellent progress enabling an elastic data center and virtually pooling infrastructure resources
Encourage customers to modernize their storage environment
The various ESG findings clearly show the significant business benefits of moving to a modern Flash storage environment—and the advantages of implementing All-Flash Arrays are more impressive still.
Could you help your customers to do more with a more agile infrastructure based on Flash storage or identify new opportunities to expand their utilization of this transformational technology?
If so, you could be helping them to save money, make better decisions, deliver faster deployments and strategic initiatives—and ultimately stay ahead of the competitive curve.
Read and share the full ESG Research Insights Brief >>
Learn more about the role of Flash storage in improved operational performance and start speaking to your prospects and customers about the proven business benefits. You can also use the free ESG online assessment tool, available for download from our IT Transformation campaign page, to demonstrate the opportunities and value of IT Transformation.
Explore our dedicated IT Transformation campaign and marketing tools >>
1 ESG Research Insights brief commissioned by Dell, ‘Flash Storage Fuels IT Transformation: The Quantified Impacts of Organizational Flash Storage Use’, May 2018.
2 ESG Research Insights Paper, ‘Research Proves IT Transformation’s Persistent Link to Agility, Innovation, and Business Value’, March 2018.
