IT Innovators: What’s Your New Year’s Resolution?

It’s that time of year again; time to start thinking about your New Year’s resolution. We all make them at one time or another, but how many of us actually follow through once the afterglow of the holiday season wears off and reality hits?

It’s that time of year again; time to start thinking about your New Year’s resolution. We all make them at one time or another, but how many of us actually follow through once the afterglow of the holiday season wears off and reality hits?

Here’s a novel thought. This year, rather than committing to doing something for yourself, why not do something for your company—something that might just end up helping you as well, or at the very least, make you look good. How about this year, you commit to cutting cost and improving efficiency in your datacenter? One way to do that is by utilizing hybrid cloud storage technology.

But let’s back up a second. To use these technologies, you first have to have bought into the idea of a hybrid cloud datacenter, one with both on-premises infrastructure and a public cloud component. For many, the transformation to a hybrid cloud is not about the technical capabilities. Rather, it’s a sound business decision that drives innovation, improves competitiveness by enabling greater agility, opens up new revenue streams, lowers risk, and increases cost savings.

Here’s the rub. The hybrid cloud allows you to collect a lot more data and with that comes an increase in storage cost and complexity. That’s where a hybrid cloud storage solution comes in. It provides an efficient and cost-effective integrated storage solution for managing storage tasks between on-premises devices and cloud storage.  It can address issues like significant data growth, storage capacity and the data protection complexities that come with it.

A prime example of one such hybrid cloud storage solution is StorSimple. Two new technologies recently introduced for the solution—StorSimple Virtual Array and StorSimple 8000 Series Update 2—now make it possible for even more enterprises to adopt a hybrid storage strategy, and in the process, reduce cost, simplify IT processes, and increase agility.

The StorSimple Virtual Array relies on a virtual machine (VM) running on Hyper-V or VMware hypervisors to provide hybrid cloud storage and supports both a network attached storage and storage area network configuration. It is highly scalable, cost-effective and easy to deploy, making it ideal for data centers with little IT infrastructure and management. Moreover, it enables users to manage data growth and data protection across all environments (remote and branch offices), rather than requiring centralized data protection and disaster recovery.

StorSimple 8000 Series Update 2 introduces local volumes, which allow the storage of primary storage within the local tier of the StorSimple 8000 series physical array or the StorSimple Virtual Array without the data being tiered to Azure. Doing so, provides higher performance for applications unable to tolerate cloud latencies. 

At the end of the day, hybrid cloud storage allows you to more cost-effectively and easily manage storage, and more efficiently scale to support the growing demands of your business. If you already utilize a hybrid cloud, the decision to also use hybrid storage just makes good business sense. If you haven’t yet made the move to a hybrid cloud, however, it should serve as added impetus to make that move sooner rather than later. Now isn’t that one New Year’s resolution worth keeping?

This blog is sponsored by Microsoft.

Cheryl J. Ajluni is a freelance writer and editor based in California. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Wireless Systems Design and served as the EDA/Advanced Technology editor for Electronic Design for over 10 years. She is also a published book author and patented engineer. Her work regularly appears in print and online publications. Contact her at [email protected] with your comments or story ideas.