Guest Blog: IT Central Station
Users of all-flash storage have a variety of options to choose from on the market. Success with one’s choice will depend on specific workloads and unique organizational requirements. However, a number of core capabilities differentiate the best solutions from all the others. For example, as storage managers embrace complex and demanding workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning, scalable and high-performing solutions like Pavilion Data are becoming indispensable. Users need solutions that can adapt to their unique cloud needs and populate virtual machine (VM) environments.
For a manager of on-premises platform software at a healthcare company, Pavilion Data emerged as the best choice for his internal company engineering operations and DevOps processes. As he explained in his review on IT Central Station, Pavilion allowed him to begin with small steps and scale up or scale out depending on his company’s needs. This article explores these, along with other key success factors for working with all-flash storage.
Reducing Storage Management Costs
An all-flash storage solution should enable cost reductions for storage management. This might mean being able to run more virtual machines on existing infrastructure, which reduces the amount of work necessary for storage management. As the manager mentioned above explained, with Pavilion, “We can eliminate most of the dedicated staff managing old, legacy equipment. We need very few people to administer the entire company’s needs using Pavilion. It’s incredible. One person can now manage all of the company's engineering data.”
One of the win-wins for the manager is that, as he put it, “Both our DevOps and engineering operations teams have a lot of compute and data-intensive activities associated with them. This unit is so dense and the performance is so high that the advice I would give is that if performance is a critical factor for your use case, then you really ought to look at this unit.”
He continued, saying, “The density is much higher than anything else we've seen. If properly configured, we can practically store the entire company's data inside of one unit. This is equivalent to replacing three or four racks of equipment. The density is incredibly high.”
Performance and scalability are two of this user’s key “must-haves.” He added that “scaling is incredibly easy to achieve. It is important to us, and Pavilion allows us to avoid the cost of purchasing extra equipment and more networking.” For his team, as they scale up, capacity is just as easy and cost-effective. Nothing needs to be changed to implement growth. He said, “You can configure the capacity by adding more SSDs [Solid State Drives] into the product, or you can configure the performance by adding more line cards.”
He then elaborated, saying, “We don't want to spend beyond what we need on CapEx [capital expense] if there is no usage driving the extra capacity.” He shared that one can start small with TBs [Terabytes] and scale up to PBs [Petabytes].
The manager appreciates Pavilion’s resilience, noting, “The solution provides us with flexibility in our storage operations. It is ‘software defined’ storage, so we can allocate capacity however we want.” Pavilion’s use of thin provisioning is a source of convenience for his team.
Cost-Effective
“Cost savings in our situation is not based on headcount, but rather time devoted to engineering,” said the manager. “We spend much less time administering storage and IT equipment.” He shared that opportunity costs have improved dramatically. He has been able to assign staff to more value-added tasks. Indeed, he previously had three people spending between 25% and 50% of their time doing related activities. Now, they have just one person spending perhaps 10% of their time. For this company, “the solution provides us with DAS performance and SAN manageability at an affordable price.”
Pavilion provides rack scale performance and density. The manager remarked, “We find it valuable that you can scale the capacity and the performance independently. The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features.”
To learn more about what IT Central Station members think about all-flash storage solutions, visit https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/pavilion-hyperparallel-flash-array-review-128078-by-reviewer1536714