IT administrators continue to face the age-old challenges of storage management complexity and cost while the burden of managing exponential data growth has businesses of all sizes considering the best ways to store, protect, and archive their files, Exchange, and SharePoint data. The need to maximize resources and infrastructure, optimize storage requirements, and improve efficiencies remain top drivers for most of these businesses today.
With all of these factors to consider, one of the most difficult skill sets for IT to find and retain are expert level administrators for specific storage management disciplines including storage administrators.
When you deploy an Enterprise or Mid-Range storage array, you generally need a team of people who are specialized in configuring, provisioning, and managing those storage arrays (let alone the compliance, disaster recovery, and other more advanced storage specializations). Decisions made daily include RAID configuration, performance tuning, device management, storage pool provisioning, management of remote replication, management of consistency groups, and management of capacity and storage tiering. These are highly specialized and vendor specific skills. They will extend out to your application servers with CLI and API command sets which must be used to perform even simple client side tasks.
Most, if not all of these technology skill demands will disappear once you deploy Cloud Storage. Of course, if you deploy a Private Cloud, you will merely be moving the skill pools to a different area, but they will still largely vanish from your day-to-day data center operations. With Public Clouds, they will go away almost immediately and entirely.
As Cloud Storage gets provisioned through CloudArray, your administrators will largely be working at the level of an average system administrator skill set when it comes to provisioning and managing storage. Configuration requirements will be reduced to basic volume count, volume size, encryption requirements, and page size requirements. None of this requires advanced degrees, decades of storage management experience, or high level vendor certifications.
By deploying a Cloud Storage model – especially for routine use cases such as online backup, archive, and disaster recovery operations – you can begin to free up highly skilled administrators and other IT specialists to redeploy and focus on other critical areas of your IT operations. Cloud Storage doesn’t necessarily mean direct reductions in headcount. Efficiency is in part about resource re-deployment without having to incur additional costs for people or infrastructure. Conversely, Cloud Storage might even allow growth in areas you otherwise couldn’t hire into before.
Essentially, as more leading-edge technologies begin to creep into IT shops and data centers, Cloud Storage is a direct and immediate way to reduce management complexity and costs affording IT the chance to spend more time on business applications, business continuity, and strategic IT planning and projects.
The best way to see this is to download and try it for yourself. Visit www.TwinStrata.com for more information.
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