Many of us in the IT Industry have grown up with Shared Storage Devices, also known as SAN or NAS devices in our infrastructure. We learned to rely on these appliances to host our data and Virtual Machines and enable never before seen capabilities like VMotion, HA, etc. .
Prior to the advent of SAN and NAS devices, maintenance was always conducted during “well planned windows of time”, usually late nights and or weekends. Most IT folks simply did not have a private life in that era, always having to deal with after hours work to make sure things were current and the dreaded “the upgrade failed” situation.
Shared Storage Devices and Virtualization changed that, we all thought we had moved to a utopian place, when we could do maintenance during normal working hours using VMotion.
Well, enough reminiscing on the past and old war stories, time to get back to the real question, “Are Shared Storage Devices (SAN’s & NAS ) a dying Technology?
The answer will be “Depends on Who Your Talking To”
If you are talking to a vendor who is deeply invested in selling SAN & NAS Technology they will vehemently deny the death of their Technology, if you speak to one of the newer Hyper-Converged Solution vendors, it is dead and long ago buried, in their opinion.
There is an argument for both today!
Almost sounds like the old Beta vs VHS arguments of the past. Wonder who’s going to win!!!
Here is my take on all of this, they are Tools and you apply the appropriate Tool to the job at hand. Is there an opportunity to use a better tool, possibly. The big question is how do you decide to move to this new super wiz bang gadget.
How do you get to use a new Tool like Hyper-Converged Appliances, there are many aspects to how you would get there and many reasons why you would, and just as many reasons why you may want to stay on a platform you already have deployed.
Let’s have a look at a couple of possible scenarios, one why you would move and one why you would stay.
Scenario 1: Moving to a New Hyper-Converged Platform
You may be in the “aged infrastructure replacement” time frame, your organization invested in this platform all at once, maybe 5 or 6 years ago when you shifted away from stand alone servers. Now the platform has paid for itself, added a lot of value to the organization and is ready to be replaced.
This scenario is quite common and is the perfect time for your organization to conduct an exercise in understanding your current IT Workloads and the organizations vision for future growth and what that will require from an IT Infrastructure.
The strategic direction the organization will be growing into as they move into the future should raise many questions that need to be explored; location, workforce and workload expansion, moving applications to the Cloud and so on.
As you go through these questions and come up with a “Big Picture” of where you are going as an organization you can then translate this into what is needed in the way of “Tools” to get the job done.
There are a lot of variations on a Theme when you look at the above scenario, part of the Infrastructure is aged part is not, workloads for some things are changing others are not and on and on.
Hyper-Converged may be the proper solution in this scenario, addressing many aspects of the organizations future plans, buying what is needed for today and being able to incrementally add what is required in the way of compute and storage resources as needed.
Scenario 2: Staying on a Current Style IT Infrastructure
Not uncommon, are organizations whose IT workloads are fairly consistent and mainly change in volume and not type of workload. Usually these types of organizations are in a specific industry and require large amounts of inexpensive storage or have special requirements or customized workflows that are accommodated by the current infrastructures capabilities to allow access to their API’s to create customized workflows.
Some smaller organizations whose IT Workloads are quite generic, office type of applications and data storage requirements that do not require any kind of specialized IT Infrastructure.
In the above scenario’s the workload requirements are not changing dramatically into the future, the workload may need more storage capacity, performance requirements have not changed much and can be handled by the current device by adding additional storage capacity.
The smaller organization has a pretty static business model, no real growth plans and nothing dramatic on the horizon that would require any kind of significant infrastructure changes. This organization will also open up a whole other area of conversation about Cloud, MSP etc.
This is where you once again find a lot of variations on a Theme, this organization may be fine staying on the platform type they currently have.
Conclusion:
If you are in IT Management, at any level, and you are looking at planning the next evolution of your DataCentre Infrastructure, you should definitely be thinking towards the future and Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) aka Hyper-Converged.
You need to really understand your current workloads as well as the future plans for the organizations direction.
You may find yourself in a situation where overall it makes more sense to keep what you have and extend the Support Agreements on the existing Infrastructure.
You may find you have a specific workload that is going to require more resources and performance than what the infrastructure you currently own can deliver.
Does it make sense to replace everything at once for the single workload or address the single workloads requirements with newer higher performing Infrastructure.
Almost any situation where you need to change your Infrastructure requires not only a Technical review from the Workload perspective but also and very importantly an Economic review.
This is where our Team of Sales and Technical Professionals can help you out, we will walk you through the modeling of both Technology and Economics to see the best path forward for your organization.
Call us, we’re here to help…
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