3 Benefits of Using Enterprise Cloud Applications

In this evolving and competitive market, businesses are continually trying to develop new and innovative ways to add value and simplify the lives of their customers. As consumers, we get to reap the benefits of better service and faster access to technology advances.

To improve client experience and organizational structure, many organizations are moving to enterprise cloud application technology. Consider the hospitality or food and beverage industry. What better industries to implement cloud storage when traditionally their servers are stored in a closet? Now all their programs and applications can run in the cloud with public cloud infrastructure.

Yet, the main benefit of choosing this solution is the ability to scale up or down resources while companies only pay for what they’re using. In addition, some of the higher-end enterprise cloud applications need modern solutions built for modern methods of app delivery. Solutions like SaaS and The Web applications are developed through solutions for cloud-based delivery offering higher security, availability, and better performance.

Consider the following three benefits of enterprise cloud applications.

1.    Slashes IT Expenses

By moving to cloud storage, you’ll naturally save on hardware and maintenance costs. But with an enterprise cloud application solution, you’ll also reduce costs for support as the user experience enhances app performance. In addition, you will likely enjoy other advantages such as the affordability of public cloud infrastructure for your business’ app delivery.

2.    Better Security

Security is a major concern for every business. By choosing safe and secure cloud networks, you’re helping secure your data and giving your company the privacy it needs. Using cloud storage for your company means no more losing files on computers or laptops due to hardware failures or theft. The cloud can keep your data and documents safe with encryption, data recovering, and backup options.

3.    Simplifying How You Work

Cloud storage solutions are replacing hardware-based solutions because they couldn’t handle the scaling process quickly and efficiently. Now, you can deliver reliable service with every app without dealing with server limitations. Until recent technology emerged, IT departments had to constantly buy and configure new hardware and software so everyone in the company had up-to-date information and new technology. Depending on the size of the company, this was a significant expense to maintain. 

Enterprise cloud application solutions solve this issue by storing applications, programs, and files in the cloud. As discussed previously, this also slashes costs for IT departments without the need to spend time and resources on new software and hardware upgrades.

The benefits of enterprise cloud applications for your business make it worth the investment. The simplicity and affordability of cloud storage make it even easier for companies to adopt the technology.

At Datera, we help organizations discover better cloud solutions to reduce costs and improve scalability. Contact us today to learn more.

Hybrid Cloud as the Future of Cloud Hosting

Hybrid cloud services are the wave of the future. As cloud computing continues to evolve and cloud services expand, hybrid cloud computing is gaining developer and investor interest with promises to change the future of enterprise IT. Even as a newer entrant, hybrid cloud computing is becoming known as the gold mine of the future.

Why Is Cloud Storage a Good Idea?

When you hear “cloud data storage,” do you imagine data floating around above you in the clouds? If so, you’re not alone. What many people don’t realize is cloud data is actually stored on hard drives similar to how data is typically stored.

But if cloud data storage is just like conventional data storage, is it any really any better or different?

What Does 2017 Hold for Object Storage?

Many companies struggle in today’s environment to manage higher amounts of information amongst the massive growth of unstructured data. It’s becoming more apparent that traditional storage hasscaling limitations and better solutions are in high demand.

Object-based storage enables a storage system to manage data as objects rather than as blocks or files within sectors. Data and valuable metadata are included in these objects making it easier to find, sort, and understand the information. Objects are stored in a flat address space, therefore, eliminating complexity and scalability challenges of hierarchical files systems in traditional storage.

Withunlimited scalability, object-based storage doesn’t outgrow a file system and consolidates storage silos. This provides a better remote backup solution with automatic data replication to a secondary site. It also uses standard hardware and avoids the expense of replacement and expansion to upgrade classic storage systems. For companies experiencing high scale growth, data accessibility with object storage could be valuable for anyorganization. 

A Shift in Software Approach

Companies interested in scaling from small clusters of data to exabytes of data need a software-based approach with affordable scalability. Object storage vendors offering the pay-as-you-go licensing model are increasingly attractive as customers prefer to pay for current usage, not 3-5 years of cost upfront. Companies can use object-based storage to deploy and manage their own private cloud storage while maintaining freedom of choice in access and protection across data centers.

To mirror requirements for organizations of any size, object storage vendors are developing a new style of software to include unified file and object-based storage in one solution. This offers several ways to access stored data.

Object-Based Storage Is Gaining Awareness

Object storage is finally on the verge of becoming known after nearly 20 years thanks to Amazon S3 being the driving leader in the public cloud storage sector. S3’s success is generating more interest in object storage and increasing customer awareness.

Another driver for object storage adoption is OpenStack. OpenStack Object Storage (aka Swift), is a free open-source software platform for cloud computing which enables solutions to be deployed as IaaS. Companies have embraced this scalable storage system to handle large amounts of data, especially in industries focused on life sciences, media, and entertainment.

A big challenge for storage systems is compatibility and interoperability between systems and resources. Most companies have a diverse storage environment and expect the same flexibility from object storage with solutions that support OpenStack Swift API and AWS S3 API. Organizations are looking for affordable, easy options to optimize their resources based on their specific business needs.

Object storage awareness is growing and will encouragemore object storage vendors to lead development and bring additional solutions to market. The conditions may be just right this year for object storage to gain traction in the storage industry.

Curious to learn more? Contact Datera for data storage solutions.

Top 3 Data Center Management Challenges

The costs for deploying and managing on-demand technology services continue to skyrocket as demand increases. To manage complex deployments with higher costs, and to ensure uptime and reliability, data center management personnel need access to data that isn’t always immediately available. The following are the top three challenges experienced in data center management and how data center infrastructure solutions can help resolve these challenges.

#1: Maintaining Uptime and Availability

If you manage your server information with spreadsheets or homegrown tools, this information can quickly become inaccurate, outdated, or incomplete. A lack of information can become a hindrance when troubleshooting is needed for unplanned downtime, or when mapping the power chain.

Data center infrastructure solutions provide one easy location to house your asset information. This offers consistent and accurate record keeping with access to readily available visual and textual information. In turn, you reduce the time it takes to locate assets, and ultimately,it helps reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot an issue.

#2: Measuring Reduced Operating Expenses in Reports

Implementing solutions to reduce operating expenses is one thing. Proving that they work and are effectively reducing expenses is another. To prove data center infrastructure solutions are working, data center management teams need to be able to collect cost and performance data and articulate their value to the business.

A dashboard on data center infrastructure solutions with reporting capabilities will allow you to instantly gather data across several dimensions. This allows data center management teams to accurately show important stakeholders how the data center is operating efficiently and reducing costs.

#3: Keeping Energy Usage and Costs Low

Many online companies run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock. This consumes vast amounts of energy, and as a result, data centers are extremely wasteful with energy consumption and electricity leading to higher costs.

Data center infrastructure solutions help monitor energy consumption and cycle off servers during the off hours. Sensors can collect information for raising temperature set points safely. They can also help companies implement an energy bill-back program which can drive energy efficient behaviors for data center management.

Need help reducing costs and managing your data center efficiently? Datera offers data center management and data center infrastructure solutions to achieve greater reliability and efficiency while saving costs. Try our free demo to learn more.

7 Steps to Save Your Organization Money with Capacity Management

Effective capacity management can offer immediate savings for organizations. For some, it can reduce their hardware and software budget by 20-30%.

Due to organizations needing to reduce expenses, IT infrastructure management is increasing to help companies cut costs. Here, we’re showing you how you can implement capacity management to help keep IT costs to a minimum. Use these steps to achieve better capacity management.

#1 Define Your Scope

Your capacity management project is defined by the resources you want to manage. Each set is designated in “pools”.

For example, managing disk space is one capacity pool. Each category must be listed in a separate capacity pool. Make sure you don’t extend your scope beyond capacity pools that don’t offer value for your organization. You must understand your organization well enough to manage only the things that return real value.

#2 Gather Trend Data

Now that you know what to manage, it’s time to understand how to manage it. You may have a tool already for gathering capacity statistics whichcan forward them to a central database. If not, collect technical level details for each capacity pool. The key is getting data from each pool and ensuring it flows to one centralized location.

Once you have the data, observe the trends. Document trends over time for each pool to understand whether utilization is growing or shrinking.

#3 Make Your Predictions

Once you see trends, you’re on your way to solid IT infrastructure management. The next step is using the trend data to make your predictions. You may notice your server utilization is growing at 4% per month which allows you to predict the server will be out of capacity in eight months.

Take your predictions beyond simple mathematics to combine other knowledge such as knowing a new program will increase percentages even higher in coming months. The more you can predict future utilization, the more valuable your capacity management program will be. 

#4 Scale Up and Out

The next challenge is deciding how much memory to add and determining when the memory will run out again. This is referred to as scaling up and scaling out.

Scaling up is adding more resources within an environment such as bandwidth to a network link or memory to a server. Scaling out is duplicating portions of the environment to add more resources such as adding another network link or server. These methodsincrease capacity and each resourcecan impact how you make future capacity utilization predictions.

#5 Organize & Share Data

By now you have lots of data about your capacity pools. To organize it all, a Capacity Management Information System (CMIS) should become your source for capacity readings, trends, and predictions. Establishing a CMIS allows others in the company to make better business decisions by using the data.

#6 Make Capacity Plans

A capacity plan offers an analysis of your data and recommendations for what to do with it. These plans are built for important applications, IT services, and IT infrastructure management. The goal is to avoid running out of capacity without buying and deploying more capacity than needed.A capacity plan includes data trends, predictions, and recommendations for what to do.

#7 Develop Service Capacity Management

To this point, you’ve managed component capacity at the lowest level. As you successfully manage components, you may start managing IT services involving complex sets of components with business value. An IT service may include a set of servers and applications that support product design. Tracking trends and measuring utilization is easier at the component level and much more complex with IT service. While important, the lack of quality tools in this area has lead business to decide service capacity management is too expensive to implement.

Start with the basics and work your way up to achieve full capacity management. Take a systematic approach to realize the potential and cost savings it can offer your company.

Need help? At Datera, we help companies achieve better IT infrastructure management. Contact us today to learn more.

The Power of Private Cloud Computing

When companies move data, applications, and processes to the cloud, they must choose which infrastructure to use and decide how data and apps will be hosted and distributed. Companies have the option of private cloud computing, using the public cloud, or hybrid cloud computing solutions.

Here we’re looking at the benefits of using private cloud computing and the differences between public and private cloud infrastructures.