The Problem

Storage Problem? What storage problem you ask? You don't have any storage problems…

As IT professionals, you have a lot on your plate: You need to oversee cloud and in-house application requirements to support demanding users. You manage day-to-day operations with service level expectations. Your staff tunes performance, ensure availability, maintain security, and research emerging technologies. It's a lot to accomplish in a 24-hour day.

One of your biggest challenges is managing data center sprawl. With today's tight IT budgets, it's a huge challenge to enable the business with data growth and avoid consuming the limited budget in floor space, HVAC, and power in the data center.

Let's consider the following hypothetical: You require 100TB of general purpose storage to come online in the next 90 days. This storage must deliver 500K IOPS at a 70/30 read write ratio. Your legacy storage vendor quotes a configuration that requires over 100RU to house 1250 Hard Drives.

Since you are required to short stroke the drives to get the targeted performance, you only get to use the outer 20% of the drive, and 80% of the 750TB raw capacity goes racked, powered, cooled and unused. Of the remaining 150TB, RAID data protection will consume at least 20%, leaving approximately 120TB of useable capacity available in a ~2.5 rack footprint containing the 1250 Hard Drives…

All of this comes on a quote that is six line items deep, lists out at $2.5 Million Dollars and doesn't include deduplication, compression, stretch clustering for disaster recovery, services or maintenance.

If you run any database applications, you probably also have DBA staff monitoring and managing general application and mission critical database performance, manually placing data and logs to maintain SLA's. Another layer of cost and complexity. And somewhere in there you have staff dedicated to opening LUNs, managing capacity, snapshot, replication and clone policies, resources, capacities. That's a problem. Can't be denied.

And what about service and maintenance for this big, complicated, inefficient HDD-based array from a mega vendor who has - probably - cobbled a solution together from several different technologies coming from a series of acquisitions…

It might appear to an outsider that data center space is being wasted, sprawl doesn't look like its under control, IT budget and natural resources to deliver acceptable levels of performance, capacity and data services, propped up by legions of administrators doing ground-level, finger-in-the-dike, block-and-tackle system support just to keep the lights blinking. Complicated. Expensive, Fragile. Those are problems.

The Solution

A single 3U Flash Storage Platform from Violin Memory provides over 200TB of effective capacity, and delivers close to 700K IOPS at a 70/30 read write ratio with consistent sub-millisecond latency. That is enough performance and capacity to support critical corporate databases, to support thousands of persistent VDI desktops, to support the most demanding enterprise applications you can think of.

The performance of Violin's Flash Fabric Architecture and Concerto OS7 operating system combine to eliminate the need for complex tiers of storage technology. Why cache? Why tier when everything can be on flash? The performance and capacity of Violin Flash Storage Platforms eliminates the need to tune databases for performance or manually place data or log files.

Violin's 7300 Flash Storage Platform also hosts a wide array (pun intended) of data protection and data efficiency services - users switchable in line deduplication and compression thin provisioning, snapshots, clones - to name a few. The Violin 7700 adds replication and stretch clustering to that list of data services, and both come with our Symphony 3 single pane management console "in the box".

The Result

Violin's Flash Storage Platforms never need to be "short stroked": You will never again see the kind of waste you've been forced to accept in the past - buying 1250 HDDs in 2 or 3 racks to get 100TB of useable capacity at the required performance level. Never again.

All Flash Arrays and Flash Storage Platforms, built on Violin's Flash Fabric Architecture, running a unified code base from OS to management console, are the antidote for server sprawl. What used to take 100RU to deliver using legacy storage, is now available in 3RU, and it is 5X faster. You become the IT hero for your users and for the business like the teams at Dick's Sporting Goods and Tyson Foods. Dick's saw their application performance improve 5x while Tyson Foods saw a 3x improvement in application performance. No denying the impact that can have on an organization's productivity.

Violin All Flash Arrays and Flash Storage Platforms have allowed customers around the world to consolidate resources in their data centers - in many cases to consolidate entire data centers at the same time that they eliminate fragility, eliminate complexity, improve VM densities, application performance and end user productivity, free up IT staff resources to find and develop competitive advantages hidden in the data center.

One customer in the technology sector has been able to raise performance levels across its organization while consolidating 21 data centers down to three. Another customer in the health care sector is adding DR capabilities with a remote data center and hosting Meditech EHR applications for other clinical facilities to help defray the costs, in part based on the performance, capacity, data protection and simple management of Violin All Flash Arrays and Flash Storage platforms. Moving to a simple, high value, high capacity and high performance all-flash solution sounds great, right? No denying that.

And on the service side, Violin provides the services and support that help customers optimize performance, and return on invested capital, reverse data center sprawl and transition successfully to the all flash data center necessary to meet today's and tomorrow's business challenges. No denying that, either.

All in, there is no denying that moving to Flash Storage from Violin is a smart, cost-effective play that will simplify your storage, simplify your data center and simplify your business. Learn more by visiting us at www.violin-memory.com/diskisdead, download a helpful thought leadership piece and enter to win tickets to see the Grateful Dead. No denying that would be a good time.

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