Data is a fundamental resource of modern businesses. Data-driven modernisation empowers operating and business models, driving businesses forward faster and more efficiently. However, accelerating data-driven modernisation requires the elimination of infrastructure complexity and the silos that slow them down.

The prolific volume and value of data in today’s systems have moved the issue higher up the agenda of business strategic plans. Simplifying data management and infrastructure with a cloud operational experience should be a top priority for IT leaders. The starting point lies with data storage.

Often, storage spending is reactive. Companies may purchase storage capacity only when it’s urgently needed. An effective storage forecasting and capacity planning tool estimates how much storage an organisation will use, allowing only enough disk space to be purchased to meet the needs of users and applications. This forecast is derived from previous storage usage trends that provide companies with automated storage reports, allowing them to plan their spending wisely.

While businesses may continue to monitor their usage and growth, it can be inefficient to plan storage capacity needs in this manner. Predicting future requirements may drain company time and resources. The business may experience over-provisioning in the instance of forecasting errors, or in an effort to accommodate expected supply chain constraints. The potential issues that arise from manual storage capacity planning often result in business resources being spent managing infrastructure, rather than focusing on value-adding initiatives and business improvement.

However, businesses can also choose to streamline their growth and build in capacity that eliminates the need to purchase storage ‘just in time’.

Storage as a service (STaaS) drastically simplifies and automates storage operations, enabling IT to meet ever-increasing business demands while providing the agility that line of business (LOB) owners and developers require to move faster.

STaaS allows businesses to consume resources when and where they need them. But on-demand consumption is just the start of the STaaS experience. STaaS leverages the speed and flexibility of cloud operations to transition IT from operator to service provider, aligning storage with business demands and allowing IT to focus on driving outcomes rather than managing infrastructure.

Consider these crucial capabilities for an effective STaaS platform:

Simplifying operations with cloud agility

STaaS transforms storage management by introducing cloud operational agility and simplicity to data infrastructure across the edge to the cloud. It must leverage AIOps that drives autonomous operations that help predict and prevent disruptions, pinpoint issues between storage, VMs and underutilised virtualised resources and receive AI driven recommendations.

Furthermore, the solution should deliver a layer of abstraction to make underlying data infrastructure invisible, eliminating silos and the complexity of day-to-day storage administration shifting operations to be application, not infrastructure-centric. It must deliver the self-service agility that line of business owners and developers require to build and deploy new apps, services, and projects faster—freeing up your IT resources to work on higher-value, strategic initiatives.

Consume flexibly as a service, on-demand

A flexible, as-a-service consumption model helps prevent over and under-provisioning problems, CAPEX budget limits, and cumbersome procurement cycles by:

• allowing businesses to quickly obtain the storage resources required with workload-optimised storage tiers
• scaling on-demand and as necessary to accommodate unforeseen workloads or usage demands
• shifting away from high upfront costs and toward transparent, predictable monthly payments based on actual metered consumption—with complete visibility into storage usage at all times.

STaaS should meet any SLA for any traditional or modern application and helps businesses drive innovation and productivity without needing to choose a specific storage solution or configuration.

HPE Greenlake brings the cloud to you and for those customers who wish to adopt STaaS, there is HPE GreenLake for Block Storage. It is the industry’s first block storage-as-a-service offering, bringing self-service agility while offering 100% data availability guaranteed. Unlike traditional storage management in other as-a-service offerings, HPE GreenLake for Block Storage allows self-provisioning storage by anyone trusted within your business.

HPE GreenLake for Block Storage helps eliminate storage complexity by providing a cloud experience everywhere, allowing businesses to simplify operations and move faster. The infrastructure is managed through a single, intuitive cloud console.  It combines the agility of cloud operations, consumption as a service and on demand, and the freedom to meet any SLA without compromise.

Meet your desired SLA with mission-critical, business-critical, and general-purpose block storage tiers with the highest possible availability and ultra-fast performance. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage provides 100% availability for mission-critical applications and an industry-leading 99.9999% uptime for all other workloads compared to the typical 99.99% offered by competitive storage offerings.

With HPE Greenlake for Block Storage, you can start quickly with instant, SLA driven quoting and rapid ordering.  The flexibility of this model also means businesses no longer need to worry about over or under provisioning of resources avoiding unnecessary spend and complex procurement cycles.

HPE GreenLake for Block Storage accelerates digital transformation by introducing a self-service cloud operational approach to on-prem workloads.

STaaS empowers the line of business and application administrators to accelerate application deployment by effortlessly self-provisioning storage instantly and without going to the public cloud.

With HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, your business can build and deploy new applications and services faster and with less overhead. It will enable your IT team to transform from operator to service provider and start managing business outcomes instead of infrastructure.

As your IT partner, we can work with you to transform your storage architecture with the best solution for your business needs.