In my last blog entry, I discussed the challenges of data center growth and the resultant growth of IT expenses, especially Operating Expense (OPEX) with power and cooling being the largest category of OPEX spending.

This can be a depressing reality for many Operations Executives. You will never get back all of the money you spent on operational expenses to keep things like legacy disk storage rotating (and rotating and rotating…). It would be very depressing to see IT waste money on old technology that simply cannot deliver on the current (and future) needs of your business. Fueling that depression would be the frustration and disappointment you would feel if your IT teammates considered yesterday's storage solutions for tomorrow's business needs and ended up missing an entire technology wave (but that is a different topic - one addressed by our CFO's recent blog)

So, don't be depressed! There is hope! I met recently with two customers who represent this hope. Each achieved an OPEX reduction in not only their storage infrastructure, but also their compute resources with the acquisition of a new Flash Storage Platform from Violin.

The first customer is in the financial services vertical and migrated a multi threaded application to a Violin all flash array and improved job processing from 15 days to 1 day. The second is a lending company who consolidated 13 servers to 2 with the introduction of a Violin flash array into their environment. This was made possible by the consistent sub-millisecond performance of Violin's Flash Storage Platforms: CPU utilization rates go up, and the need for extra, idle cores goes down - or away! These two customers not only achieved an OPEX reduction by not continuing to fill a rack (or racks!) with hard disk drives, but were also able to save themselves the use of server resources (and eliminate applicable power and cooling load!). In some cases where software is licensed per core, OPEX is reduced there, too. That doesn't sound very depressing to me!

We were also able to help these customers through our Professional Services offerings. We helped each with specific optimizations catered to their workload as well as migration services for moving the data onto their new Violin flash arrays.

Lastly, consider IDC's recent commentary on new flash-based architectures: "Flash deployed at scale brings much more to the table than just high performance, and many enterprises have found the impact of flash not only transformational to their IT infrastructures, but also to their business processes." 1

Disk is Dead and it's time to (finally) lower your OPEX - we can help!

1Why AFA Architecture Matters as Enterprises Pursue Dense Mixed Workload Consolidation, ©2015 IDC #258074, sponsored by Violin Memory, written by Eric Burgener, Research Director for IDC's Storage Practice.

If you would like to know the details, regarding how you can optimize your storage spend and start the transition to flash for primary storage, please contact your local Violin Account Executive or Reseller partner. They have everything you need to get started now.

You can also discuss your specific requirements with our architects and engineers at VMWorld in San Francisco August 30 - September 3, or if you would like to learn more at your own pace, download our thought leadership piece at www.violin-memory.com/diskisdead.

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