Choosing An Enterprise Storage Solution Is Like Choosing A Fine Cigar
Data storage aficionados know that selecting the right enterprise storage for a company’s data infrastructure to handle business-critical applications and workloads is like choosing a fine cigar. The quality, cost, size and strength vary. Not all cigars are the same; neither are enterprise storage solutions all the same.
The buyer, such as a CIO, CISO, IT director or storage manager, needs to do their research, just as cigar aficionados would investigate the different types and origins of cigars in their quest for premium-quality, handmade cigars that are worthy of celebration. Likewise, the storage buyer is on a quest, establishing and following criteria that light up attention on a premium-quality enterprise storage solution for the best value.
Savvy and smart criteria for choosing a fine cigar involve assessing taste, aroma, size, strength, curation, tobacco and price. A buyer will consider cigars from the top countries for such products, including Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. It’s similar to when an enterprise buyer of storage for their data infrastructure looks at each vendor in the various IT analyst write-ups on capabilities, costs, features and business values.
Understanding what to look for—what are strong criteria for enterprise storage—is the starting point. Innovation sets the stage. Something different, something refreshing. An unexpectedly delightful and enriching experience. An innovative approach that delivers powerful values—both technical and business.
However, unlike a cigar that you can put aside and then buy a new one right away, the decision to deploy any enterprise storage solution is a long-term commitment. Much more is at stake. You don’t want your data infrastructure to go up in smoke because of a poor decision on your enterprise storage.
To keep our cigar analogy lit, here’s what I see as savvy and smart criteria for choosing a great enterprise storage solution:
Key Considerations
Equate the taste of a cigar with the ease of use of an enterprise storage system. It’s something that you can experience. You can look at the management software and interact with how easy it is to use.
Linked with taste is aroma, just as ease of use is linked with autonomous automation. The more autonomously automated a storage solution is to manage as part of the enterprise infrastructure, the more the user can appreciate the “aroma” of the enterprise storage system.
Size makes a difference. The capacity of an enterprise storage system is hugely significant, as no enterprise wants to suddenly have all its applications and workloads run sluggishly or have access to stored data grind to a halt. And with the capability of consolidation, you can significantly reduce the capex and opex of enterprise storage.
Curation is the process of how the tobacco is fermented and aged in a sealed area to prevent a bad cigar. In short, working to guarantee you have a great cigar. Guaranteed SLAs do the same for your enterprise storage. Giving you guaranteed SLAs on performance, 100% availability and cyber storage resilience insures your application works well and you have good data with which to work.
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Size of a cigar also makes a difference, affecting the intensity of the cigar. Capacity size of a storage array affects the digital capabilities of an enterprise, and life in information technology can get intense when a roadblock in capacity is hit. An enterprise must have the option to expand capacity quickly, with something as simple as merely issuing a P.O.
Strength of a cigar equates to the reliability, durability, cyber resiliency and performance of an enterprise storage system. You need to know you can rely on it. You gain confidence when you know that, when you look under the hood of the storage array, there is a powerhouse in there. The strength of a storage system delivers high performance at low latency, and it’s able to endure the rigors of enterprise data applications and demanding workloads.
Furthermore, a cigar is only a cigar if it has tobacco. Likewise, an enterprise storage system is only an enterprise storage system when it has high availability. Just as every cigar worth its wrapper has tobacco, every enterprise storage array has some form of availability—some are better than others.
But what enterprise buyers really need and want is 100% availability. This is the premium offering that has IT buyers going out to buy cigars to celebrate this level of availability. Nothing less is acceptable anymore, although many enterprises are waiting to do their storage refresh to elevate their availability.
Last but not least, price comes into play, just as with anything for sale on the market. Yet, while any given cigar has a price, the price is more multidimensional when it comes to enterprise storage. In enterprise storage, it’s about garnering a positive ROI in as short a time frame as possible. It’s about using flexible consumption options to reduce costs and only pay for what you use. It’s about the total cost of ownership.
Just like a cigar aficionado wants the best value, an enterprise storage aficionado wants the best business value and technical value.
Not everyone likes to smoke a cigar or approves of cigars, and that’s okay. However, the comparison is relevant because it showcases how criteria drives the buying process. If you have faulty or incomplete criteria, you may end up with less-than-optimal storage arrays. However, if you follow the criteria of an enterprise storage aficionado, as I laid out in this article, you won’t go wrong when you can grasp 100% availability, autonomous automation, ease of use, lower capex and opex, and high performance at the lowest latency.
Light up your IT life with premium-quality enterprise storage. Don’t settle for less from the incumbent vendor. You deserve more for less.
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