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You’re probably familiar with the phrase, ‘if it isn’t broken don’t fix it.’ Otherwise known as leave well enough alone or don’t tamper with something that’s functioning adequately. The problem is when well enough isn’t well enough anymore.
There is a reason storage hardware refresh cycles are often characterized as a major and daunting task. Planning a storage hardware refresh can not only be incredibly challenging but also incredibly expensive. Yet, it’s not unusual for companies to follow a three to five year hardware refresh cycle.
There are opportunities to maximize your hardware investment and extend the life of your storage environment, but you must have access to the right data. In order to mitigate risks and vulnerability from reactionary decisions, IT leaders need access to data transparency across the enterprise infrastructure. Visual One arms IT Leaders with efficient tools so they can plan ahead, track growth trends, and negotiate new storage purchases while avoiding any unnecessary, reactive purchases.
Take Control of Your Storage Environment
According to a survey from Uptime Institute, from 2015 to 2020, refresh cycles have lengthened from three years to five years. As hardware improves, there are diminishing returns for more frequent storage environment refreshes. Instead, extending the life of the platform becomes a much bigger bang for the buck.
The key to successfully extending the life of your storage environment lies in data transparency, in having a unified, visual analysis across your multi-vendor storage environment. It’s essential for reliable insights into performance, capacity, utilization, and governance challenges. Visual One provides IT leaders with the critical insights required for efficient and smart infrastructure planning.
Storage Insights Essential for Strategic Planning
Don’t get pressured into buying new storage before it’s actually needed. Hardware vendors continue to advocate for more frequent storage refresh cycles, typically every three to five years. While your OEM (original equipment manufacturer) may recommend you perform a hardware refresh for a number of reasons, as your storage equipment reaches its EOL (end-of-life) and EOSL (end-of-service-life), you may feel additional pressure to buy new.
However, these milestones generally only indicate a date on which your OEM will no longer offer support or maintenance for your hardware. These dates shouldn’t automatically dictate a need to make a costly upgrade. Rather than just blindly upgrading your storage hardware, you can extend the life of your storage environment, dramatically cutting costs.
Maximize your current investment by optimizing your storage environment. At Visual One, we believe that IT leaders should be armed with efficient tools that enable the storage transparency and reliable insights required to make strategic IT decisions. With these tools, you can:
- Plan ahead
- Forecast precise outcomes
- Improve budgeting accuracy
- Track your growth trends
- Avoid unnecessary, reactive purchases
Optimize Your Current Storage Environment
Are there some parts of your storage environment that are performing nearly at capacity? Most companies don’t optimize their storage and then find themselves bumping up against limitations quicker than they should. Visual One can help identify workloads that could be moved around to reduce capacity on specific arrays. Visual One can also help you identify non-critical data that could be relocated.
Delivering superior data confidence in minutes rather than days, helps IT leaders see potential challenges with any current storage configurations as well as monitor for any excessive spikes and stay aware of any potential single point of failure. All of this is done without burdening teams with learning new systems or protocols. When you partner with Visual One, a seasoned storage consultant will be monitoring and analyzing your environment from day one, sending you a weekly email to help you stay aware of any potential risks and opportunities.
IT leaders must stay aware of risks to their storage environment, but all too often, they are asked to make strategic infrastructure decisions without easy access to critical and reliable data. At Visual One, we believe IT leaders should be armed with reliable tools that enable storage transparency and data confidence.
Visual One simplifies your storage management process into a cohesive single pane view across your multi-vendor storage environment. These insights allow you to save time, reduce costs and improve efficiency. Schedule a demo to talk to a Visual One data expert.
Key Takeaways
- Maximize your current investment by optimizing your storage environment with Visual One.
- Planning a storage hardware refresh can be incredibly challenging and also incredibly expensive.
- As hardware improves, there are diminishing returns for more frequent storage environment refreshes.
- Extending the life of your storage environment is a bigger opportunity for cost-saving.
- Visual One brings IT leaders storage transparency that can deliver essential insights needed in minutes rather than days.
