WD is flexing its storage muscles with a new composable infrastructure platform
Underpinning today’s data revolution are data architectures which define how data is stored, arranged, managed and used.
With the rise of data-intensive applications such as AI and analytics and the deluge of unstructured data brought about by IoT, there is a growing need for more efficient and flexible data architectures so that organisations can keep data centre costs low and increase speed, agility and time-to-value for data initiatives.
On top of these business requirements, companies are also facing louder calls to reduce environmental impact. All of these factors call for a new breed of IT infrastructure that handles data more quickly, smartly, and efficiently.
An imperfect mix
The problem with existing servers is that the hardware resources that comprise them are “fixed”. Although servers are being asked to crunch a variety of data-heavy workloads, memory, storage and networking do not currently adapt to these workloads’ particular requirements. This often leads to suboptimal performance, whether that’s overprovisioning, strained or underutilised resources.
So when it comes to making investment decisions, IT managers often discover they have either over or under spent in certain hardware areas. For large cloud-scale data centres, this translates to damaging costs and inefficiencies and ultimately impacts customer satisfaction and retention. A proposed solution to this problem is composable infrastructure:
“Composable infrastructure is where compute, network and storage resources can be disaggregated into shareable pools of storage capacity to scale independently and incrementally as needed to meet business needs,” explains Manfred Berger, Senior Manager, Business Development, Platforms, at Western Digital. The data storage giant recently launched its OpenFlex composable infrastructure platform and is seeing encouraging uptake in the European market.