Moving performance workloads to the cloud

February 22, 2017

Storage is a complex, confusing, dynamic element for a business, and traditional and self-hosted storage methods are, quite simply, not keeping up with the changes required. If you need simplicity, agility, scalability, availability and predictably-performing storage then we would recommend moving your performance workloads across to the cloud.

 

We have found that the biggest problems businesses face in today’s technology-driven work environment are that they need to know that their workload will be guaranteed when moving across to the cloud, it will be secure and that their database, application or system will perform.

 

Through our Enterprise Cloud’s (Virtual Data Centre) use of SolidFire, RSAWEB is the first Internet Service Provider on the African continent to provide a storage system with granular Quality of Service that is able to deploy innovative all-flash, scale-out storage to our data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

 

 

Enterprise Cloud (VDC) allows you to easily manage resources on demand with fast, secure, scalable infrastructure that delivers guaranteed and predictable performance and removes the barriers typically associated with the move to the cloud.

 

Through regular customer engagement, we found that many of our customers felt that the complexity required and high costs to manage their own storage was having a large impact on their business.  Increasing risk and costs, storage was becoming a real bugbear. Adding to this, the promise of the cloud – the ability to quickly adjust to business needs – was more often than not stifled.

 

We found that many businesses are reluctant to consolidate mission critical applications due to concerns over performance on shared resources, while others noted that the delivery of storage performance was a major pain-point within their daily business.

 

 

Many businesses feel a huge pressure in having to ‘guesstimate’ what their storage capacity and performance requirements are going to be in the next three to six months and beyond to two, three or four years’ time, with incorrect estimations costing huge capital outlays. Another great concern for storage professionals including CEOs, COOs, CIOs, CTOs and CFOs is performance troubleshooting and the ‘time-hog’ that logging support calls and downtime creates.

 

If any of these concerns sound all too familiar, we recommend moving your businesses performance workloads across to the cloud. This move is guaranteed to:

• Reduce risk
• Allow for seamless growth
• Save you money

 

Let’s take a moment to break each of these reasons down further:

Reduce risk

RSAWEB’s cloud environment enables a business to reduce their risk by providing a scalable environment that ensures supply of resources as and when they are required. No longer do businesses need to outlay a massive capital expenditure without knowing precisely what their needs currently are, or will be in the future. With Enterprise Cloud (VDC) one can increase and decrease resources (I/Os) as required and host different workloads on different performance tiers to ensure seamless zero-downtime adjustment for performance & capacity.

 

RSAWEB is also able to guarantee performance to every application with real SLA Quality of Service guarantees made possible through ring-fencing of servers, which does away with the issue of ‘noisy-neighbours’. This allows for a consistent guaranteed storage performance experience for every application.

 

 

Seamless growth

Some of the business outcomes our customers can expect to achieve when buying storage services from us include the ability to scale capacity on demand and change performance on demand with zero application impact.

 

The ability to scale on demand is an incredibly valuable tool for customers who regularly have an increase in workload at a specific time, such as monthly reporting at the end of each month or when testing an application or an update. With our cloud system we are able to build that high tax requirement into the SLA, even though it is temporary. All that is required to gain more storage is a quick call to increase performance temporarily, then return to the lower-cost daily resource consumption.

 

 

Save money

Making use of Enterprise Cloud (VDC) will result in savings on storage costs as one is now able to directly align the resources required with business needs, removing the guessing game and reducing the risk of needing to pre-buy capacity. You therefore no longer need to worry about outlaying massive capital expenses in order to gain the storage you require, as we are able to turn more storage on or off as required.

 

Through Enterprise Cloud (VDC) you no longer need to worry about slow disk performance as we can guarantee mission critical application performance by having various systems running on different tiers of the product.

 

If you are looking for an easy to manage, cost effective storage solution why not chat to us?