When it comes to Data Center Management, the need for ease and agility are key concerns. More frequently, in small to medium-size businesses, the driving need is “make it easier for me.” The need in higher-end enterprises is “show me a quicker way to profitability.” cStor designs and implements FlexPod solutions for all sizes of clients across any industry including private, public and hybrid cloud providers.
I like to describe FlexPod options like going to the salad bar – you build your salad with three main ingredients that you choose based on your requirements. You select your greens—spinach, spring mix, iceberg, etc—that’s your compute. Then add the toppings —tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots—that’s your network. Choose between seven kinds of dressing—your storage. In the end, the way you combine these ingredients determines if you end up with a Caesar, Greek or other types of salad simply based on how the available ingredients are combined. This is truly how one can build FlexPod differently to meet the demands of unique business environments.
Small and mid-size businesses like the Operational Ease of FlexPod®
While all companies can face staffing issues, typically, small to medium-sized businesses are understaffed from an IT perspective and usually have limited resources. FlexPod brings together a validated design that includes the three major components of the infrastructure: Network, Compute and Storage in a cost-effective and management-efficient package that will work right out of the box.
Enterprises appreciate the Operational Maturity and Agility of FlexPod®
The speed of deployment is critical for timelines. More often in medium and large operations, IT can be a bottleneck to supporting business requirements. When ramping up for a need, scaling up delivery can take weeks or months. There is a process that starts with funding the project. IT needs to find the budget, go through the vetting process of finding the right equipment to meet the application needs. Then there is purchasing, delivery, setup, and implementation before this new application is ready to support the business. So even when an organization has the equipment on-site, it can take weeks to make it available to the business. FlexPod gives IT the ability to improve efficiencies when delivering back to the business. The validated design helps IT gear up for new demands more quickly; reducing time to deploy from weeks or months to hours.
FlexPod’s infrastructure is Private Cloud ready®
FlexPod is a versatile foundation for provisioning the data center. The FlexPod infrastructure provides and facilitates cloud computing. The ultimate cloud vision is that you don’t care what the hardware is or where it sits. You only care that the applications that sit on that hardware are available all the time, on any device, to any person who needs to see it (and has permission to see it).
FlexPod helps facilitate agile private, public and hybrid cloud computing to meet the business appetite. For instance, one client uses a private, onsite FlexPod infrastructure to support billing for 25 days every month. Then, during the last 5 days of every month when demand surges, this isn’t enough infrastructure to support billing activity. So, they augment their onsite FlexPod with an off-site FlexPod to increase capacity during this burst of activity—thus Burst Cloud Computing with a Hybrid Cloud solution including a lot of Private Cloud resources and a little bit of Public Cloud resources. They are only paying for the five days of extra power, then scale back to consume less during leaner demand periods.
cStor offers FlexPod options bringing together the right ingredients to serve business needs now and scalable for future growth or periods of vacillating demand. With FlexPod, we can help limited-resource companies be more efficient and we help enterprise companies get to market faster. Give us a call to find out options for your data center needs.
