The cloud sets the standard when it comes to on-demand agility, elasticity, and as-a-service consumption. Organizations value the simplicity, self-service, and automation capabilities that this experience gives them. As a result, IT admins have been tasked with bringing that experience to their mission-critical apps without sacrificing performance and resiliency.
Source: BrandPost: Finally! Bringing the Cloud Experience to Your Mission-critical Applications
Recent research from ESG[1] shows that 88% of organizations have a strong desire to bring cloud-native applications on-premises, demonstrating an increasing shift to more and more local applications. These same businesses demand the cloud experience. Which begs the question: How can you get cloud operational agility that’s self-service and on-demand – via invisible infrastructure – that anyone can manage from anywhere?
A few select, on-premises data infrastructure solutions today provide the resiliency, agility, and overall operational experience of the cloud. The most effective solutions satisfy three business requirements.
Requirement #1: Instantly provision workloads at scale
When your business needs additional storage capacity, you cannot afford to wait. On average, it takes 1.5 days for most enterprise IT organizations to provision storage, as determined by a recent ESG research study. IT admins typically work through spreadsheets to determine the capacity and performance headroom across their storage fleet. Work tickets have to be created and handoffs made manually across the organization to get storage capacity provisioned. It’s an extremely complex and time-consuming task for IT teams, and far from perfect.
Due to this lengthy provisioning period, developers can’t access the storage capacity at the pace they’re expected to – the pace they know they could obtain in the cloud. Instead, they find themselves stuck in limbo for a day and a half, delaying application testing and development, subsequently slowing down business momentum.
What organizations need is data infrastructure that enables instant provisioning for IT admins, app owners, and developers – leveraging AI to optimally determine where data should be stored. A true cloud provisioning model would accelerate the application development cycles demanded by today’s fast paced DevOps and CI/CD pipeline processes – without being bogged down by limited provisioning capacity.
HPE Alletra, powered by Data Services Cloud Console, offers this industry-first capability. Intent-based provisioning lets users instantly provision on-premises storage at scale with the cloud experience. Intent-based provisioning determines where data should be stored across the entire fleet – with real-time context to resource headroom and app-specific SLAs, optimizing your resources. The AI-driven, self-service console leverages role-based access control – delivering a true cloud provisioning model for app owners and developers, without the need for storage expertise. It’s time to say goodbye to complex and time-consuming storage provisioning.
Requirement #2: Consume storage as-a-service
It’s no secret that your data is constantly growing, but acquiring and integrating more infrastructure at a moment’s notice is a lot to ask. It’s a challenge for your hardware to keep up with the unpredictability of business demands. IT admins are equally challenged to predict what resources they’ll need and how much time it will take to procure, configure, and deploy capacity. Traditional data management can be extremely inefficient, slowing down the business and impeding innovation.
The financial burden of traditional infrastructure can also be significant. Large upfront CapEx costs burden your finance teams to manage cash flow. Once again, businesses would typically turn to cloud for an OpEx model that facilitates these payments, leaving more cash available each month for other purposes.
IT needs to shift from owning and maintaining data infrastructure to simply utilizing it on-demand and as-a-service. Original Postroducts/storage/alletra&resourceTitle=HPE+Alletra+%E2%80%93+Power+your+data+from+edge+to+cloud+brochure" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Storage-as-a-service solutions free up your cash flow and increase financial agility with flexible consumption. Consumption models that utilize buffered capacity allow you to instantly scale resources without having to worry about unpredictable new resource demands. This in turn saves you time and money – and frees you to focus on the things that matter most to your business.
True storage as-a-service is available today through HPE Alletra with HPE GreenLake, storage infrastructure with the performance, scale, agility, and efficiency businesses need delivered entirely as-a-service. Cost-effective infrastructure delivered as-a-service offers cloud operations that deploy, provision, manage, and upgrade the on-premises infrastructure – and the flexibility to elastically scale on-demand.
Requirement #3: Manage from anywhere
Managing the lifecycle of on-premises infrastructure is difficult with manual processes. Managing the lifecycle of a fleet of mis-matched on-premises systems in a complex infrastructure can be nearly impossible. For example, an IT administrator of a regional hospital group might manage more than a dozen different hospitals. To check on the capacity for each, the admin would have to VPN into every hospital; in the worst case scenario they would drive to each site regularly to troubleshoot and upgrade services. While software can help reduce the travel requirements, managing the software that handles these activities for on-premises storage can be mind-boggling. Each management tool has separate processes, rules, consoles, and best practices – a potentially overwhelming scenario for the storage admin.
Cloud-native operations abstract data and infrastructure from the physical infrastructure to eliminate silos and complexity, providing optimum performance in fleets like these. HPE Alletra provides everything you need to manage and monitor your fleet from any location – at your fingertips. That’s because the cloud-native infrastructure is delivered through HPE GreenLake, meaning your IT admin can control and monitor storage from anywhere, on any device. The cloud-native control plan scales automatically with infrastructure, so managing hundreds of systems across multiple geographies is as simple as managing one, through a SaaS-based console accessible from anywhere – and on any device.
This is especially important in our new distributed way of working, a result of the global pandemic. HPE gives businesses the flexibility (and peace of mind) they need that their systems can always be accessed and monitored, no matter where their IT admins are working: home office, data center, or even the local coffee shop.
Now…create cloud operational agility in your data center.
Gone are the days when one had to sacrifice the simplicity, self-service, automation, and manage-from-anywhere capabilities of the cloud to achieve the resiliency, long-term cost management, and data sovereignty of on-premises. For the first time ever, HPE Alletra powered with Data Services Cloud Console and HPE GreenLake are bringing data innovators, data managers, and IT administrators the cloud operational agility they desire – right in their own data center. Our world is changing, and it’s time for the infrastructure that supports your business to pivot.
It’s time to bring the cloud experience to your applications and workloads, wherever your data lives.
For a more thorough look visit HPE.com
[1] ESG Data Management Survey, April 2021, commissioned by HPE
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