Companies moving to virtualisation are discovering that applications requiring disproportionate amounts of capacity are adding unexpected cost and complexity to their storage arrays, says HP.
Marco Vieira, Storage Country Manager at HP South Africa, says as South African enterprises increasingly virtualise their environments, they are encountering a new challenge: provisioning for application performance and reliability.
"Moving multiple applications to a single environment is a common cause of performance issues," he says. Within a single tier of storage, there is always the risk that one application consumes resources that impact on the performance of other applications.
"Most CIOs are dealing with the challenge by isolating demanding applications in separate pools of storage, and over-procuring capacity to ensure these applications run effectively. They size for peaks and problems, rather than getting to the root of the problem. But this is a costly and inefficient way to deal with these 'rogue apps' and noisy neighbours."
Vieira says performance is a top priority for CIOs today. "Performance is crucial, and it's a key factor driving enterprises to look to all flash arrays. But in addition to performance, they need to be considering issues like resiliency and efficiency. Flash performance doesn't help if you cannot limit the impact of noisy neighbours and rogue applications on overall service delivery," he says.
"You should not have to compromise anything in the interests of performance. In fact, the performance, latency and resilience in an all flash array should be a significant step up on what you were achieving with your existing infrastructure."
"You should be able to deliver quality of service in a world of multiple applications in an array - you need to be able to easily limit the impact of one application on the others and ensure the right levels of latency for each application, without resorting to over-procurement," he says. Vieira adds that IT needs to ensure that new all flash arrays easily integrate into existing infrastructure, and that the all flash array integrates seamlessly into the application environment in order to ensure quality of service. "Factors such as integration and provisioning can impact on cost and overall performance in this new environment," he notes.
Download: White paper - Maintaining application performance with all-flash arrays and storage QOS
Download: Questions to consider when selecting an all-flash array
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