When Do-IT-Yourself is Not Good Enough?

Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Product Marketing at HGST, a Western Digital Corporation brand, 30 years of engineering and marketing experience in systems, flash, disk, and tape storage, Scott Cleland enjoys a rich history in storage and solutio...  More >>

The millennial age is upon us. It is the age of ever increasing data ingest (2.5 Quintillion bytes of data per day) and ever increasing demands for intelligence and knowledge derived from this data for business line managers, CIOs and COOs.

How many DIY projects has been the root cause to rolling out intelligence?, and new services on-time and cost effectively? How many have cause endless delays in compatibility and interoperability across the various hardware and software elements?

The pendulum swings between investing in DIY and using converged, shrink-wrapped systems to meet demands in the cloud storage markets (as-a-service, backup targets, or archiving systems). It is not always easy to see when the right approach is the ultimate correct path.

  To get to a successful path a cloud IT organization it should eliminate as many variables as possible to make the predictable element—predictable  

Cloud, cloud, cloud. Yes. We know it’s all about the cloud. More and more data is created and stored through public, private and hybrid clouds or delivered back through the cloud to customers, and employees via any and all applications you can possibly dream of.

Let’s talk about the changing landscape in IT when it comes to cloud storage. This is really a dramatic transformation and worth pen to paper time. We have heard the term bimodal from Gartner.

‘Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.’

Within this definition of bimodal is the concept of DevOps.

Definition of DevOps

DevOps is a new term emerging from the collision of two major related trends. The first is called “agile system administration” or “agile operations.” It sprang from applying newer Agile and Lean approaches to operations work. The second is a much expanded understanding of the value of collaboration between development and operations staff throughout all stages of the development lifecycle when creating and operating a service, and how important operations has become in our increasingly service-oriented world.

Build vs Buy

The reason I have defined these two terms is to amplify the notion that the IT landscape has evolved (oris evolving) to meet the demands of our new digital landscape.

When deciding whether to build or buy storage to meet these new requirements it is important to educate and get operational buy-in from many influencers within the operations of a large enterprise organization.

In the transformation of enterprise IT from traditional SAN/NAS/DAS models to cloud, this notion of Agile and Lean is front and center. This can apply to bringing new services to market or bringing a new application or software product to market consistently and with a high level of repeatability and predictability.

The key question to ask yourself is “how fast is my data growing and can my vendors keep up with my demands for increased capacity and/or performance” and… “What happens when something goes wrong?”

If you cannot answer either of these questions then DIY may not be a good path for you as it will limit your ability to be fast, agile and lean to meet new demands your business partners (or customers) are placing on you.

To get to a successful path a cloud IT organization it should eliminate as many variables as possible to make the predictable element—predictable. If you do not take the necessary steps to fully understand what you are getting into the results will amount to too much “heavy lifting” and compound the project execution and most likely produce an unfavorable result with a poor foundation.

In Walks Object Storage

Cloud storage is The millennial approach to scale and cost and need not be a DIY project. Turnkey solutions provide the tools for the agile and lean DevOps teams to derive their respective outcomes effectively, on budget and will certainly be a tantalizing new approach to business lines and stake holder constituents. Enterprises as well as storage service providers should carefully assess and choose which vendor (or vendors) will successfully support and provide scale capabilities to their IT infrastructure.

Eliminating complexity is the key to find your path to the cloud. Fundamentally these items should be front and center:

♦ Simple to Deploy - Power and network connections are all you need
♦ Limitless Scale - Grow your storage in line with your capacity needs
♦ Archive Resiliency - Preservation of data through advanced high integrity storage
♦ Highest Efficiency - Highest capacity per square foot and lowest power per TB
♦ Highly Secure - End-to-end encryption security for data-in-flight and data-at-rest
♦ Cloud Availability - Survive an entire data center outage with geographical distribution of data

The integration of HGST's advanced object storage software provides the foundation for a resilient object storage platform that delivers the highest level of data durability in the industry, surviving an entire data-center outage when deployed across multiple sites. Utilizing the most advanced 8TB second-generation HelioSeal hard drives, coupled with its vertically integrated hardware, the scale-out object storage system delivers the performance, efficiency and scale required for public and private cloud, with extremely low $/TB and watts/TB.