Many organisations are
feeling the strain as they
try to cope with modern
enterprise storage
infrastructures which are
spread across a diverse
range of locations.
Neil Stobart, Vice
President, Global System
Engineering at Cloudian,
explains the issues
businesses face and how
to overcome them.
sStorage infrastructure has
evolved significantly in recent
years. What are the main issues
that this is presenting for
modern businesses?
Like virtually all aspects of IT, the world
of storage has developed at a rapid rate.
The days of organisations relying on a
single on-premises server with storage
sitting in the backroom are long gone.
Modern enterprise storage infrastructures
may include hundreds or even thousands
of interconnected users, applications,
network connections and devices –
all spread across a diverse range of
different locations. What’s more, these
infrastructures now commonly utilise a
mixture of on-premises and public cloud
storage, all of which leads to a lack of
visibility which makes them increasingly
hard to monitor and manage efficiently.
It’s no surprise that many organisations
are feeling the strain. Monitoring and
managing this new generation of
increasingly complex and geographically
distributed storage infrastructure requires
a huge amount of time and attention from
already overstretched IT teams. Not only
do they have to meet users’ ever-evolving
capacity and bandwidth demands, they
also need to stay on top of numerous
operational factors to ensure services
can be delivered without a hitch. Outages
and disruptions need to be kept to the
absolute minimum.
Just how problematic
is the visibility challenge
for organisations?
The short answer is that it can be
extremely problematic. If businesses lack
a comprehensive view of their storage
infrastructure, they will be less likely to
spot any potential issues or troublesome
trends that could indicate serious
problems further down the line. Factors,
such as network latency, excess capacity
usage, malfunctioning components
or rogue user behaviour, can all point
towards long-term problems, such as
potential security risks or misdirected
spending. For example, a pronounced
spike in data downloads could signal a
data security problem and that users are
not compliant with security policies.
Poor visibility also makes it significantly
harder to optimise systems. Are users
experiencing a good service? Are any
nodes running low on capacity? Is the
infrastructure optimally configured? These
Modern enterprise
storage infrastructures
create challenges for
businesses
62 Issue 18
www.intelligentdatacentres.com