It seems like only a few years ago that managing data growth was a high-priority objective for most users. What happened? The short answer is the same thing that happened to oil. Data is the new oil.

Every business would do well to follow the Scout Motto when it comes to data’s disaster backup and recovery. Preparedness is essential in a computing environment where it is “when,” not “if,” disaster occurs. But no matter how much money is thrown at data protection, bad guys and bad weather alike can strike without warning.

Coupling diverse applications with appropriate storage can be a drama-filled matchmaking game. There’s always a better, faster storage product debuting to tempt customers away from the tried and true. But the performance of all-flash or cloud storage may not justify the cost for some apps. How can companies get their storage straight for legacy and modern apps in hybrid and multicloud environments?

This week’s episode is the first in a series from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris catches up with Erik Kaulberg from INFINIDAT to discuss how the expanding hierarchy of solid-state storage media will drive new products and solutions in the future. The topics of conversation cover how media has diversified, with new solutions like MRAM and 3D-XPoint. At the same time, we hear that 5-level NAND could be a reality. How are vendors combining these products with traditional storage?

Infinidat came knocking, Chris Hilliard said he needed only a little bit of convincing to ditch his old IBM XIV storage. Hilliard, a network engineer for the city of Norfolk, Va., said his team had been searching for an alternative ever since IBM "abandoned" the XIV block arrays.

Currently, many organizations are looking towards the cloud as a ‘silver bullet’ for their data storage challenges. However, it is interesting to note that many of those already in the cloud are looking to leave it (aka ‘repatriation’). Why, one may ask? Well, two reasons come to the fore: cloud frequently fails to deliver on the expected cost savings, and security still remains a concern due to massive cloud data breaches. Moreover, companies are seeing monthly cloud payments increasing rapidly. As a result, CIOs are now grappling with whether to migrate data into the cloud. However, there are ways to achieve this, while maintaining data sovereignty, using intelligent data storage solutions.

Customers love all the choices of public cloud computing, but hate having to sort through, combine, and implement them for specific business goals. This has refreshed market opportunities for managed service providers. Some now help businesses understand and implement public cloud solutions, as well as provide their own unique services. They have to cover more ground to enable diverse applications to run in a number of different environments. This can make it challenging to pick the right infrastructure, like storage, for their data centers. Far from decimating its business, public cloud adoption helped drive the expansion of Thrive Operations LLC. Over the last few years, the MSP has been helping customers navigate all of the choices in public cloud.

Digital business today is defined by the treatment of data as an asset. With new data economies come new demands for storage and data portability across on-premises and cloud-computing architectures. While technology’s service providers are anxious to emerge victorious in this multicloud world, Infinidat Inc. has taken the path less traveled to find a better way to support data by the exabyte.

This week we are in sunny, Florida at the VeeamOn 2019 conference. At the show, we are interviewing everyone from Veeam insiders to partners who help paint the IT Pro landscape with solutions to solve some of your toughest challenges. At VeeamON 2019, we sat down with Infinidat’s Executive Vice President of Business Development, Robert Cancilla, to talk big data and what has changed since 2018.

Infinidat is trialing a software-defined all-flash array to sit inside Infinibox.
The high-end array maker developed the software in response to the requirement of Epic Systems, a prominent US healthcare software provider, that its health records application must use all-flash arrays.