Modern technology teams strive to deliver agility, scalability, and affordability for their organizations. For many years, VMware has been a key component in IT strategies. Now, traditional capabilities are making way for new approaches such as DevOps and containerisation. These approaches allow teams to respond to market needs faster. But the shift is testing storage capabilities like never before.
Many organisations are struggling to leverage their VMware environments efficiently and keep up with ever-changing compute requirements. Pure Storage® can help organisations that have standardised on VMware:
- Accelerate application modernisation with containerisation
- Simplify infrastructure and optimise existing resources
- Use machine learning (ML) to manage and forecast storage costs
- Meet stringent requirements for business continuity
The DevOps Shift and Containerisation
In a DevOps environment, it’s hard to imagine a conversation that doesn’t touch on containers. Kubernetes launched in 2014. Today, nearly 90% of organisations run container technologies in production to get the speed, efficiency, and agility developers demand. However, as with any shift, it takes careful planning to integrate containers.
“Unless your infrastructure and management are tuned to the task of running containers, you will come across a lot of failure points.”
—Matt Oostveen, CTO APJ for Pure Storage
Organisations need a clear storage strategy when transitioning to containerisation because it has vastly different requirements than traditional enterprise storage. Container workloads are more dynamic and have higher application density. As a result, you need to rethink your storage infrastructure to ensure you get the greatest benefit from containerisation.
Together, Pure and Portworx® simplify adoption, enabling you to take your VMware implementation to the next level of application innovation. With deep integration across your VMware environments, FlashStack™ can support a unified server, storage, and networking environment, including the integration of VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes initiatives.
Meanwhile, Portworx provides the most complete Kubernetes data-services platform. It delivers cloud-native storage for Kubernetes with built-in high availability, data protection, data security, and hybrid-cloud mobility.
An important consideration in this shift to containerisation is the impact on storage architecture. Consider this as an opportunity to reinvent your storage requirements to gain the agility, speed, and capabilities you need to keep pace with rapid change.
Pure1® and the VM analytics functionality give you access to persistent storage for containerised workflows across your hybrid cloud. You can also manage any security, incompatibility, or continuity concerns throughout the transition.
What’s the Best Architecture to Optimise Data Center Resources?
Think about the critical outcomes you’re trying to reach. A modern storage infrastructure must enable you to operate, scale, and resource it based on the functional requirements of your business. Although hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) within VMware environments was developed to deliver this control, it doesn’t scale efficiently.
“Organisations need a cohesive strategy and architecture for their storage requirements. One that is centered around control to scale as required, when it’s required, and for the right applications.”
Matt Oostveen, Pure Storage
With HCI, all compute and virtual machines share storage. This means, as your workloads increase over time, you reach storage capacities well before maxing out your compute capacities. Adding storage to HCI means also adding unneeded networking and compute capacity, which is expensive and inefficient.
In contrast, FlashStack is a converged infrastructure solution—and a much more scalable alternative. Using converged (or disaggregated) infrastructure provides the benefits of HCI but also allows you to scale storage independently.
Consider a scenario where you’re implementing AI workloads that are heavily reliant on GPU. You’ll probably want to apply them differently across your applications. A simplified, modern architecture that leverages disaggregated infrastructure allows you to control how, where, and when you scale. This means, if you wanted to reduce AI capabilities on your web applications to make way for enhanced model deployment on asset performance, you can scale, secure, and automate specifically to do it, without heavy compute overhead or additional unwanted resources.
Centrally Monitor, Plan, and Predict Requirements and Costs
By saving on overhead, IT teams can optimise data-center and physical resources and focus on more mission-critical initiatives. Importantly, with Pure1, you can monitor your entire VMware environment from anywhere. This AI-powered platform for data-storage management and monitoring provides capacity updates so you can evaluate the impact on performance and compute and make well-informed decisions.
Pure1 simplifies troubleshooting so you can gain insight into the dependency of each resource. As a result, you can optimise, plan, and manage your infrastructure more effectively. Its AI, analytics, and machine-learning capabilities provide the ability to forecast future impact. If you need more storage to enhance your workloads to support enterprisewide initiatives, you plan accordingly. By simulating the impact across critical areas, you can predict the effect on resources, costs, and return on investment to help you make more informed and insight-led decisions.
Pure Storage has been a VMware Technology Alliance Partner for more than a decade and part of the VMware Ready program, the most rigorous partner integration program.
