Get cloud-like flexibility for data storage with IBM Storage Utility Offering
As technology plays an ever more significant role in our daily and working lives, the data generated and consumed by the digital products and services that we use is increasing exponentially.
In fact, IDC predicts that by 2025, 175 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be generated globally each year. To put this into perspective, 1 ZB is roughly equivalent to 281 trillion music tracks.
Storing ever-increasing volumes of data
For businesses that rely on data to power their business, ensuring that they can store, access and process vast amounts of data quickly and cost-effectively is a huge issue, especially for IT professionals tasked with planning how much data storage their business will need in the months and years ahead.
Typically, IT professionals calculate how much data they expect their mission-critical applications to use and then do their best to predict how much additional capacity their organisation may need in the future.
However, anticipating future storage needs is notoriously difficult and many capacity planners find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they underestimate future storage needs, which could impact growth, or they overspend on additional capacity that ends up sitting idle—wasting capital that could have been used to invest in innovation.
Embracing flexibility
To help businesses turn the tide on ineffective capacity planning and boost storage flexibility, IBM developed the IBM Storage Utility offering. With this solution, businesses can access a wide range of best-of-breed flash, hybrid and disk-based storage—and pay only for the storage capacity that they actually use.
To help organisations maximise cost savings, IBM calculates storage usage monthly and bills quarterly – so, if a business requires less storage for one month, their cost of storage will reduce for that period.
Similarly, if a business needs to store more data, they can use the available capacity and simply pay the difference at the quarter’s end—eliminating the need for lengthy, complex and costly tender processes and physical upgrades. Even businesses with multi-vendor architectures can take advantage of this offering if they virtualize their storage environment with IBM solutions, enabling them to break free from vendor lock-in.
Usage details are tracked using IBM’s free online Storage Insights monitoring tool to provide a simple, consolidated view of usage and telemetry from the environment.
Full cloud, on-prem
What’s more, the latest evolution of cloud-like on-premises storage from IBM even does away with minimum charges and baseline capacity. Businesses can deploy the capacity they anticipate they’ll need in the future, pay nothing at all for the new physical arrays, and pay only for the capacity they actually use on a monthly basis. With no risk and no commitment, this is an even more flexible option for the least-predictable environments such as test/dev.
With over 30 years’ experience as an IBM Business Partner, Northdoor has the skills and expertise to help businesses maximise the potential of their storage environments. Northdoor’s storage experts can help you more accurately predict your storage needs and deploy flexible IBM Storage solutions that reduce your costs, reduce complexity and enhance scalability.
Northdoor’s storage experts can help you more accurately predict your storage needs and deploy flexible IBM Storage solutions that reduce your costs, reduce complexity and enhance scalability. Share on XTo find out more about how Northdoor can enable your business to reap the rewards of flexible pay-as-you-go storage, visit our IBM Storage Utility page. You can also sign up for a free, no-obligation assessment of your storage landscape.
