Working as a solutions architect exposes me to a variety of customers in unique sectors. Often these engagements involve customers discussing their cloud strategy. At times, they may not have the full understanding of what this actually entails. — Jeremy Lichtenstein, Hewlett-Packard enterprise solutions architect at Pinnacle.

To put it simply, your cloud strategy refers to the vast information network of hosted products and services offered by various third-party companies. You do not need to move your data outside your organisation to “go cloud”. Surprisingly, this is what many companies believe a cloud strategy refers to. Cloud typically consists of three parts, namely — private, public and hybrid:

Private cloud refers to your on-premise equipment hosted locally at your company’s head office. This can extend to hosting your own systems with a third party and using a form of “private network” to link the data centre to your organisation.
Public cloud is when you pay another company for services such as e-mail or hosted servers. Here you have no control over most of the infrastructure other that your respective virtual servers.
Hybrid cloud is a blend of both services. You host services that are more effective in the public cloud, such as e-mail, and keep more business-critical services such as a company database or file services, which are faster when accessed locally (depending on your connectivity) on premise. (VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure is another option but that’s a topic for another day.)

Each cloud option comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages and should be accessed based on what will suit your businesses workload and specific needs. Customers often forget that if they need to get their data out of the cloud or even move it to a different tier of storage, they will pay transfer fees — often referred to ingress or egress costs. These costs can go into the millions of rand depending on the size of your data. Security is another big factor to consider: where should your data be stored? With data protection sensitivities and the PoPI and GDPR regulations in place, your data needs to be kept in-country and secure. If you keep your data locally, your IT provider needs to ensure you are running an effective firewall. But bear in mind you can be just as vulnerable when outsourcing this service.

With the amount of data that we are creating, it gets tricky to know what to do with it all. This is where “intelligent storage” comes into play. This technology uses artificial intelligence to learn where the best place is for your data to be stored. In essence, intelligent storage is a storage system or service that uses AI to continuously learn and adapt to its hybrid cloud environment to better manage and serve data.

To name a few, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has 3PAR, Nimble and Primera storage device options. These can be deployed as hardware on premise, a virtual appliance or as a cloud service. Intelligent storage can move data where needed and proactively optimise data through its lifecycle. It provides data protection and encryption to eliminate potential security threats and is often sold as a “pay-as-you-go” model.

Exactly where needed

Managing your data more effectively means you are not putting inactive data on your expensive flash disks or business critical information such as live databases on slow Sata disks. It ensures that your workload is sitting exactly where it is needed, when it is needed, without anyone needing to physically make the changes.

Connecting these systems with HPE InfoSight allows predictive analytics to monitor the health of the equipment to ensure that hardware or software issues don’t impact your business.

Ultimately, you need to consult the right people when making a technology investment to ensure you’re getting the right solution that offers the level of intelligence and continuity that your business needs to thrive in our digital economy.

Put your data into the right cloud and do it with HPE Intelligent Storage.

For more information contact [email protected].

About Pinnacle
Built on the foundation of entrepreneurial spirit, Pinnacle is South Africa’s leading ICT distribution company. We offer a broad range of world-class technology products seamlessly delivered across an expansive footprint. Everything we do is underpinned by our technical expertise, drive and determination – we call it delivering the exceptional. For more information about Pinnacle, visit our website or contact our offices on +27 11 265 3000. You can also follow Pinnacle on Twitter, join us on Facebook and on LinkedIn.