5 Essential Elements in Building an Agile Data Center
Storage vendors for some time have been requiring IT organizations to commit to either a scale-up or scale-out approach to data storage, without truly understanding the eventual characteristics of a specific set of application workloads. After all, the I/O requirements of an application workload can change substantially after it’s first deployed.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) today updated the HPE StoreVirtual 3200 array with new functionality that gives IT organizations the option to scale up by adding more drives or scale out by logically connecting multiple storage controllers together. In addition, IT organizations can now opt to federate their storage environments by employing HPE Peer Motion software to move workloads between arrays.
Brad Parks, director of go-to-market strategy and enablement, HPE Storage, says HPE is trying to provide IT organizations the maximum amount of agility possible when it comes to storage architectural decisions.
“We’re taking away the need to make a binary decision,” says Parks. “We want to enable our customers to be able to think more strategically.”
As part of that effort, the HPE StoreVirtual 3000 File Controller used in the HPE StoreVirtual 3200 system has been extended to support both structured and unstructured data requirements using a common pool of data.
HPE also claims that the latest edition of the HPE StoreVirtual 3200 is the first storage array to make use of 64-bit ARM processors to run a storage operating system. The HPE StoreVirtual 3200 also for the first time makes use of 10GBase-T interconnects to reduce HPE networking costs 40 percent by running 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections over standard twisted-pair copper.
When it comes to data storage these days, there’s clearly no shortage of options. The issue is that most IT organizations don’t know what type of applications will need to access which data from one day to the next. The rate at which new applications are being deployed continues to increase. Each of those applications, however, usually wants to be able to access the same pool of data as every other application. Forcing IT organizations to make storage decisions in advance of deploying an application is the very antithesis of IT agility.
