How to Stop Worrying about IT and Focus on the Data

For IT staff, managing legacy storage technology is a losing proposition: It takes an increasing amount of time and energy but provides diminishing returns.

For example, many agencies manage multiple storage systems, each for a different type of storage format — e.g., block, virtual machine, file or object. Each format has benefits, but it can be a bear to manage all those individual systems and the interfaces involved.

That’s why Pure Storage offers an integrated data platform with an operating system called Purity that manages that complexity, said Matthew Alexander, Field Solutions Architect at Pure Storage, which provides flash-based storage solutions.

By simplifying the IT environment, an agency can focus on “getting value from the data rather than managing the hardware on top of which it runs,” Alexander said.  

The Benefits of Flash

Legacy storage can also be a drag on your overall IT environment’s performance and on the efficiency and sustainability of that environment. Alexander learned that firsthand when he was a systems administrator/ architect with a government agency.

The agency shifted to flash-based systems from Pure Storage. Flash storage has no moving parts, so it is faster and requires less energy. Flash also is much denser, storing the same volume of data in a smaller system. All told, a flash-based system consumes 90% to 97% less electricity to store the same number of bytes.

For the agency, it was a revelation.

“It’s interesting that when we incorporated flash storage in our environment, we didn’t realize how much our previous storage platform was negatively impacting the performance and the availability of our environment, and … how much operational complexity we had,” Alexander said.   

The Weight of Technical Debt

Then there’s the problem of technical debt. Rather than investing money in new technology, an agency keeps investing in the legacy tech, scraping by as long as they can but having little to show for it.

Agencies need a storage solution that evolves as requirements evolve, Alexander said.

That’s the idea behind Pure Storage’s Evergreen program. Through this program, an agency can purchase a storage platform today, and Pure Storage will keep the hardware up to date over time and add new software features as they become available. And unlike when buying a whole new system, there’s no need to spend money on data migrations.

Another budget challenge is that many agencies have integrated their compute, network and storage systems. That architecture requires an agency to scale up all three technology stacks in lockstep. Being able to scale granularly where you need it — e.g., just storage capacity — can help with budgets, Alexander said.

In short, by simplifying the IT environment and reducing technical debt, an agency can focus on “getting value from the data rather than managing the hardware on top of which it runs,” he said.

This article appears in our guide, “The 5 Habits of Highly Productive Agencies.” To learn more about making your organization more productive, download it here:

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