Despite the disruption caused by the coronavirus, organisations are in need of flexible storage now, more than ever before. This storage should be available across both public and private clouds, and on-premise.
With employees working from home, organisations need additional storage capacity and they need it fast.
Moshe Yanai, CEO and founder of Infinidat, a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for primary storage, explained the main storage outlook trends in this Covid-19 era, during the 34th edition of the IT Press Tour.
1. Storage price leaders have a competitive advantage in storage during periods of financial uncertainty.
2. Customers can’t stop consuming storage.
3. Organisations can slow down greenfield projects.
4. There is extreme CFO scrutiny on big-ticket line items
5. There is a Willingness to take uncalculated risk in search of cost savings
6. Premium brands are losing a share of the wallet to price leaders.
7. Share gains will persist indefinitely.
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A flexible storage model
Dan Shprung, EVP EMEA and AVJ, explained that there currently a number of storage models that organisations can adopt; CapEx (blackbox), Capacity on Demand (COD) — grow as your business grows — and FLX (Opex), which enables customer to use storage without big upfront commitment. In this scenario, Infinidat bills customer based on use per month and it can increase and decrease capacity, according to what you need and use.
“This is public cloud billing without the disadvantages, lowering the risk in times of uncertainty,” he said.
Infinidat’s aim has been to educate the market about this flexible model (FLX), which currently represents 30% of its pipeline is FLX.
When adopting this model, Infinidat will do hardware refresh without any downtime, so organisations don’t need to worry about availability.
“It’s all the benefits of a public cloud consumption model, but on the private cloud, which is more cost effective and secure,” Sphrung continued.
What’s needed for private cloud transformation?
Outside of the challenges caused by Covid-19, most enterprises have built their infrastrcuture to focus on deeper knowledge, rather than time-to-market.
The public cloud providers agility for those companies that can’t build that agility into their private cloud. But, this is costly.
“Moving the same application into public cloud can lead to a cost increase of 20%,” said Eran Brown, EMEA CTO.
The cloud drives all the technologies that support transformation
IT can’t deliver agile infrastructure and time-to-market if it’s waiting for procurement — this model has to be disrupted in order for private cloud transformation.
The current scenario is long-winded; approve, procure, ship, install, configure, business value — private cloud.
The ideal scenario is; approve, business value, invoice — public cloud.
What’s missing for making private cloud agile from a procurement perspective?
1. Most models require strict commitments, high cost
2. Growth is neither transparent or instant — not agile
3. Customers prefer CapEx to Opex — most models fail to deliver on that.
A better private cloud means a better multi-cloud strategy
How the private cloud can adopt a public cloud consumption model
Infinidat offers that capability to move from COD and convert Opex investment to CapEx, which helps organisations become agile in their infrastructure at scale and provide an alternative to the public cloud in their private cloud.
Successful transformation of infrastructure, still needs automation tools and an re-skilled workforce — there needs to be a transition phase to train on new technologies and procedures.
End users, however, shouldn’t have to understand the underlying complexity of a solution — IT teams need full power of DevOps with the software behind it and an outside interface that IT administrators can operate easily.
Top of mind for EMEA CIO
- Data sovereignty in light of US Cloud Act
- Automation
- Digital transformation — data becoming strategic to the business’ success.
