7
Streamlining all-flash transformation | A Blueprint for Accelerating Data Transition while Minimizing Disruption
Guiding Principle 1: Identify priority applications and workloads to maximize immediate investment returns B U S I N E S S C H A L L E N G E : IT organizations often lack the proper tools and methodologies to effectively evaluate application requirements and develop well-informed data migration strategies.
When formulating a migration strategy it is important to identify and prioritize the applications that will benefit most from the new technology. All-flash storage arrays deliver breakthrough read/write speeds with ultra-low latency. They are ideal for data-intensive, delay-sensitive applications like analytics, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and online transaction processing (OLTP). All-flash arrays also deliver extremely high availability and are well suited for business-critical applications and workloads. There are several aspects to optimizing the adoption of all-flash in the data center. A first step is establishing criteria for setting the migration priorities. Critical aspects include expected short-term returns relative to the effort and risk levels of the transformation. This cascades to development of a phased implementation plan. Typically business and operations teams collaborate to identify and rank applications hampered by performance or reliability constraints of disk-based storage systems. There is also an opportunity to reduce storage requirements. This requires one-time methods and procedures that can discover infrequently accessed data. Once identified, such data can be purged or moved to a supplemental storage tier as part of the transition. The criteria, ranking and collaboration work together to eliminate guesswork and consciously align data value with storage costs.
