GUIDING PRINCIPLE 1

Guiding Principle 1: Identify priority applications and workloads to maximize immediate investment returns

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: 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.

The conversion to high-speed flash storage can strain existing infrastructure. Organizations can minimize such risks by deploying automated discovery tools to examine the existing infrastructure environment (compute, storage and storage networking) for load scenarios that can negatively impact performance. HPE Pointnext recommends evaluating the architecture to identify changes needed to support the all-flash implementation (i.e. higher-capacity switches). A smooth journey to an environment optimized for all-flash often requires close collaboration between business teams and operations, InfoSec and networking groups.

Checklist:

1. Work with business and operations teams to create a prioritized list of applications and corresponding data to transition to the new all-flash infrastructure.

2. Use automated discovery tools to gain visibility into the performance and utilization characteristics of existing applications and IT infrastructure, and identify remediation requirements.

3. Upgrade IT infrastructure, update administrative practices, and coordinate and communicate activities to ensure a graceful transition to the new storage environment.

Expected Results:

Well-informed migration strategy that tightly aligns storage investments with data value.

Prioritized roadmap to optimize performance and reliability for data-intensive and business-critical applications.

Data-driven plan to update existing IT infrastructure and practices.

Understanding and Prioritizing Data Migration

Identify and prioritize target applications

Data-intensive Latency-sensitive Business-critical

Discover legacy infrastructure performance gaps

Compute Storage Networking

Remediate existing environment

Infrastructure Processes Flows