IT infrastructure is becoming more and more entwined with basic business operations. As this trend continues and accelerates, business questions such as – What is it worth to you to stay ahead of your competition? What is a better online customer experience worth to your bottom line? What advantages do you gain by making faster, more informed business decisions? Can you afford not to have the best possible fraud protection and data security? – are becoming information technology questions.

Data storage plays a crucial role in the performance, reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of IT infrastructure, so to a large extent, these can be questions directly related to your data storage. When you begin to answer them at the storage level, and recognize how crucial a role storage plays in the right answers, then the value of solutions such as IBM® FlashSystem™ skyrockets.

The Drivers of Information Technology

Looking into the near-term future, business and IT industry analysts see five basic drivers of information technology, and thus of business itself:

• Cloud: More and more of the world’s computing will move into the cloud and be delivered over networks and/or the Internet for end users to consume.
• Data analytics: Compute tasks for business will focus more and more on data analytics, enabling enterprises to more quickly and accurately measure, understand, and take action powered by real-time insights.
• Mobile and social systems of engagement: Some of the largest commercial consumers of compute resources from now into the foreseeable future will involve mobile and social engagement applications, providing powerful business drivers and enormous growth potential.
• Security: The linchpin of the future, none of the other drivers flourishes without establishing and maintaining the trust of end users and the security of their precious information.

These new technical drivers all share common characteristics when viewed from a data storage perspective. Add the necessity to keep all of this digital activity secure, and the storage requirements become clear. High volume, high velocity, random input/output (I/O) data stream profiles predominate.

Other important trends in enterprise data storage emerge as well. For example, operational advantages and costs will gain greater importance within storage system purchase and deployment decision-making. High performance based on ultra-low latency, cost and operational efficiency, and mission-critical reliability will be the essential attributes required of storage in the future. In fact, these are the value dimensions upon which the IBM FlashSystem family of allflash storage platforms have been engineered.

Flash technology has transformed storage and given enterprises the ability to extract extraordinary value from complex data sets. IBM FlashSystem arrays provide industry-leading performance, reliability, and operational efficiency plus a full spectrum of enterprise-grade virtualization management and storage services. These all-flash storage solutions offer multiple options for addressing the ultra-low latency, random I/O requirements of cloud, big data analytics, mobile e-commerce, and massive social systems of engagement computing environments.

 

Schedule a consultation today to learn how Flagship and IBM FlashSystem technologies can help prepare your business for the future.

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