As companies continue digital transformation journeys that include increased adoption of cloud applications, they look for simpler, easier ways to manage data.
Eric Sheppard, research vice president for the infrastructure platforms and systems group at IDC, says as companies make this shift to cloud-native, they will need “uncompromising” data security over a single management platform.
IT managers have told IDC that more effective automation and orchestration will remain central to them accomplishing their digital transformation goals. Sheppard says 67% of IT managers surveyed say automation and orchestra has become “very or extremely important” to them right now, and another 62% say the pandemic accelerated the need to focus on automation and orchestration.
That’s why Hitachi Vantara partnered with Cisco to deliver Cisco Intersight Automation with Hitachi Vantara VSP storage.
Marcus Maddox, global strategic alliances manager at Hitachi Vantara, says that data today is more diverse, dense and distributed than ever before. With so much data to manage, how do companies know what data they have? Where the data resides? And how much value the data holds?
Maddox says companies can’t answer these questions without agile processes and automaton. In the past when data was stored in multiple silos, some 80% of a big data team’s time was spent finding, acquiring, integrating, and delivering data to the right people.
“Agility has to be a part of your business today,” says Maddox. “Businesses need infrastructure that can support their business needs and challenges and help them react as new IT issues come up.”
An Easier Way to Manage Hybrid Storage
Enter Cisco Intersight with Hitachi Vantara VSP storage:
The VSP 5000 Series offers agile data portability across the enterprise. Hitachi Vantara also offers its E Series and the F and G Series are still important to the portfolio, catering to companies that don’t need NVmE drives for higher bandwidth management needs.
Maddox points out that all the Hitachi platforms have a common operating system and management suite. They also feature storage virtualization, which makes managing storage easier and more agile.
“In the past, IT teams would have had to do a forklift upgrade, they would have needed a full workload migration,” says Maddox. “Now, even in a diskless environment, they can place it on the floor, remap the volumes back to VSP, and take advantage of data reduction, cloning, and replication.”
And it’s all managed by a single, easy-to-use interface via Cisco Intersight, which gives IT managers an overview of the arrays, storge utilization, software versions, and VSP models. Intersight also offers a dashboard of the RAID levels and types and number of applications, and lets IT managers manage and build configurations and easily provision storage into a VMware environment.
Bottom line: Your customers can reduce costs because they reduce the need to hire storage specialists to manage all the silos. And they get agility via storage virtualization and ease-of-use with the single dashboard.
Image Source: Getty Images / Hitachi Vantara