FEATURE : ENTERPRISE STORAGE
“ We are seeing an increasing interest in cloud adoption as part of the accelerated Digital Transformation strategies of most enterprise companies ,” said NetApp ’ s Kanafani . According to Kanafani , NetApp engagements with the major hyper-scalers is particularly important to support our customers in leveraging cloud storage resources to deliver the business outcomes they are seeking . “ As a cloud led , data-centric , hybrid multi-cloud software organisation , NetApp is helping customers to make the right choices , balancing the different clouds , to create the optimal environment to manage their data securely and thrive ,” he said .
Mahmoud El Kordy , Business Unit Executive , IBM Systems , Middle East and Pakistan , said in the new era we are living today , many organisations are having to transform traditional business models to deliver innovative digital experiences and offer their personalised services to their customers through digital channels that are trusted , secure and highly available .
As a result , noted El Kordy , the data storage market in the Middle East has been steadily growing , driven mainly by the uptake of advanced technologies such as AI and Big Data as part of the Digital Transformation journeys that organisations in the region have embarked on . “ Data storage plays a key role in every transformation journey where the data has become the currency that fuels competitive advantage for every successful business ,” he said . “ Also , an increasing demand for smart phones and other devices underpinned by the Internet of Things ( IoT ) along with a massive growth in social media channels has also increased the demand for additional storage . This continues to drive the growth and demand for advanced data storage solutions in the Middle East .”
Mouteih Chaghlil , CEO , Middle East and Africa ( MEA ), Bespin Global , said the main three features that favour adopting cloud as opposed to other storage forms , as well as ensuring that it is the future of enterprise storage focus on the technology ’ s unlimited capabilities which allows infinite customisation , the availability of pay-asyou-go models and the multi-tier security measures that could be applied . “ Unlike the on-premises offerings , cloud storage provides users the ability to pick and choose the capacity they need from the cloud storage services , with no high CAPEX and great speed , availability , security and high performance ,” he said .
Assaad El Saadi , Regional Director – Middle East , Pure Storage , said there is no doubt that cloud storage is the future of enterprise storage . “ The user economy is gaining ground in all traditional IT infrastructure areas and the benefits are clear . You ’ re no longer purchasing anything ; you ’ re consuming a service ,” he noted . “ Research shows that many CIOs feel consumptionbased models significantly accelerate Digital Transformation due to the transparency and agility to repurpose capital to address business demand . To future-proof storage infrastructure , organisations will need flexible consumption of file , block and object storage for on-prem or the cloud . The premise is simple – if you pay only for what you need , you don ’ t have to worry about predicting the future to buy or lease storage years in advance .”
Server and network optimisation
Cloud storage
Given that enterprise cloud storage consists of storage capacity purchased from a public cloud service provider , enterprises often turn to cloud storage to reduce or eliminate excessive on-premises storage costs , reduce the complexity of managing storage and upgrade data centre infrastructure . The three major public cloud storage providers are Amazon Web Services ( AWS ), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure . Others include Alibaba Cloud , IBM ’ s Bluemix , Oracle and Rackspace , as well as a host of regional providers .
With CIOs being urged to optimise their server and network infrastructure to maximise their enterprise storage deployments , understanding how best to enhance their storage , compute and network resources is far critical now than in the past .
Kanafani pointed out that that with the support of On- Command Insight for the on-prem infrastructure or On-Cloud Insight for cloud-based operation , NetApp is showing CIOs how they can optimise their environment on the storage layer , compute and networking as well . “ Intelligent executive dashboards are created to provide
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