You have invested heavily over the years in data centers believing that these investments would handle all of your IT needs. Now that disk is dead, those same data centers have become your albatross, dragging down business performance and consuming valuable resources that could be better spent developing innovative applications to drive the business forward. At this point, the title of CIO almost seems to stand for "Career is over." When anger gets directed inward, it is called depression.

CIOs today are facing the universal challenges of increasing operational efficiency and improving the customer experience through innovation. After all, companies face increased competition from a variety of new sources, and these companies are looking to technology for answers. That makes IT leaders a very strategic partner, yet a McKinsey survey shows that satisfaction with IT effectiveness continues to decline.1 How could that be? Let's look at some not-so-fun facts about the current state of IT, talk about depressing.

First, IDC expects data to grow to 40 zettabytes by 2020, this at a time when IT budgets that have been relatively flat for years show only modest increases. Second, data center growth is exploding, as are their operating costs, chief among them are power and cooling. In fact, here's an interesting chart showing the expected power consumption in the years ahead. According to an SNIA whitepaper on the TCO of Solid State Storage, energy costs will soon consume up to one-third of IT budgets.2

Projection of Datacenter Electricity Use

Now, couple that with a look at where all of that power is being used. Not too surprisingly, 26% is being consumed by storage and servers while another 50% is used for cooling. As equipment rack densities increase, your aging data centers are running out of capacity to power and cool all of that equipment.

Typical Data Center Energy Consumption

With all of that money flowing into operational expenses, what's leftover for your team to innovate? That same McKinsey survey found that a mere 11% of IT spend is on activities that can drive the business forward - respondents agreed that application development is the most important activity yet is the least well executed.

Not too surprisingly, vendors are responding with yet more tools to purchase that promise to automate and improve operational efficiency through software defined capabilities. While such benefits may be within reach, the downside is that these tools also increase IT complexity, placing increased performance demands on the underlying infrastructure. Can the prospects be any more depressing? It's a vicious cycle of investment to achieve business benefits that always seem to be just out of reach. Yet, IT leaders continue to pay these costs.

Fortunately, disk is dead. Its replacement, the all-flash storage array, significantly reduces these operational costs, allowing those savings to be redirected to fuel innovation and prolong the life of your data center investment.

It's interesting to consider the case of dumping your disk and going all flash. Analyst estimates put power and cooling savings for all-flash storage around 50-80% over legacy disk storage. That certainly fits with what a leading network infrastructure company was able to achieve. Consider applying these savings to your own situation across your entire data center; now, what could you have done with all of that money?

Throughout history, man has tried all sorts of ways to treat depression. Some even work. So, before you book your next purge, Electroconvulsive Therapy or Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation session or take your next Prozac pill, transition to the final stage of grief - acceptance. Accept that Disk is dead. You'll never get back all of the money you spent on operational expenses to keep your legacy rust rotating, so stop making things worse by throwing good money after bad. Cut your data center expenses with Violin's Flash Storage Platform, it's the painless way to bounce back from depression.

Check out a useful thought leadership piece to cheer you up and register to win cool prizes. But hurry. In fact do it now. The window to enter our drawing ends at midnight, July 3, 2015.

Notes:
1. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/it_under_pressure_mckinsey_global_survey_results
2. http://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SNIA_TCOCALC_Workpaper_Final.pdf

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