Applications are the core of the modern organization. Today’s businesses rely on hundreds, if not thousands, of applications to power processes across the organization, from sales to customer acquisition to operations. Gartner recently predicted that worldwide spending on enterprise application software would surpass US$201 billion by 2019 - that’s a substantial amount, and goes to show how fundamental an impact applications have on business outcomes.
These applications depend on rapid, uninterrupted access to data in order to function optimally. When the delivery of data to applications is disrupted, it can hamper productivity and negatively impact business outcomes. A research study conducted by Nimble Storage on 3,000 IT decision-makers and business application users globally revealed that 47 percent of business users say they waste more than 10 percent of their day waiting on applications. Interestingly, respondents in Southeast Asia were also more demanding of and affected by their technology infrastructure than their US, Australian, UK and German counterparts with 84 percent indicating that these delays significantly affected their ability to perform at their best.
With application workloads evolving and big data coming of age, enterprises need infrastructure that have the ability to deliver both low latency (data velocity) and high density cost effective storage.
Ensuring data velocity is critical to maintaining a competitive edge as enterprises are now entirely dependent on data to improve customer interactions, accelerate product development and run the back office. Delivery of data to applications relies on not only storage, but compute and network as well.
In the past, enterprises were forced into making a choice between performance or capacity, with the different arrays providing specific benefits for a business’ storage infrastructure. While All Flash arrays delivered absolute performance for applications requiring deterministic low latency, Adaptive Flash arrays (arrays built from the ground up using both flash and disk) delivered optimized performance for mainstream applications. The good news is enterprises today no longer have to compromise. The evolution of flash enables the cost effective acceleration of every application – however, the question remains, is fast flash enough?
Simply throwing all flash storage at the problem addresses only one aspect of the infrastructure. So how can businesses ensure there are no slowdowns and delays in data delivery? The secret lies in predictive analytics across the infrastructure stack.
Identifying the app-data gap
At Nimble, we refer to the delay between the application and the speed of data delivery, as the app-data gap. While there are many potential causes for the app-data gap, organizations should first look at the complexity of their infrastructure stack.
Examining the root cause of application breakdowns across more than 7,500 customers, Nimble’s survey revealed that over half of all application disruptions stem from issues outside the storage layer. These include compatibility problems, network configuration issues and inadequate compute resources.
Closing the gap: Predict and prevent breakdowns
Fast flash alone is often not enough to close the app-data gap given that more than 50 percent of barriers to data velocity take place outside of the storage architecture. Addressing the app-data gap therefore requires combining the agility and flexibility of flash with cloud-based predictive analytics to overcome data disruptions, no matter where the barriers occur across IT infrastructure.
With predictive analytics, organizations can identify potential hotspots and future needs, and ensure optimal long-term performance by eliminating error-prone guesswork. Analytics can assess vast amounts of information to find the needle in the haystack, and solve even the most complex of issues.
Predicting potential issues that might occur across the application-to-storage stack, which might result in slower data velocity, predictive analytics enables businesses to avoid disruption, and improve productivity by reducing time wasted dealing with infrastructure problems.
Today’s IT infrastructure is crammed with complexity, and a major app-data gap can disrupt data delivery, degrade worker productivity, create customer dissatisfaction and damage a company’s overall productivity. Enterprises are demanding more from their storage systems in terms of performance, availability, agility and ease of use, but as we have seen, solving just the storage problem is not enough.
While it may be easy to dismiss the app-data gap as a minor cost of doing business in an increasingly connected world, organizations who write off the issues as petty annoyances may actually be putting their company’s competitiveness and productivity at risk. Choosing the right storage solution is therefore paramount, and a solution that combines flash-optimized architectures and predictive analytics to help organizations address evolving concerns is necessary for business success.
For a deeper discussion with Mark Lazarus, Director of Technology, Nimble Storage, on overcoming the app-data gap.