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IT'S TIME TO STOP THE FEAR OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES: HOW CAN YOU CHANGE YOUR USUAL SOLUTION PROVIDERS AND IMPLEMENT MORE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES INTO YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE?

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"Change is immutability in changing circumstances", - Samuel Butler


Many companies have so-called "approved vendor" list, whose technologies and solutions were implemented into company`s IT-infrastructure for a long time. The basis for the formulation of such lists was not the subjective opinion of the CTO or board members, but the situation at the enterprise.

At the stage of building a complex infrastructure from scratch, its creators started from the specifics of a particular business, its main processes and operations, the number of employees, and the need to build a geographically distributed network. These factors justified the choice of fundamental software and hardware solutions for building an enterprise network, data storage systems and disaster recovery, creating a reliable and protected perimeter of certain manufacturers.


However, the basis of any company's strategy that's going to function for decades (at least) is expansion. Business develops: the branches is appearing, the network is expanding, the number of employees, including those who work remotely, is increasing, and operational processes become more complex. All that make the IT-infrastructure of this business change, modernize and expand in direct proportion, as well as requires the implementation of new systems in addition to the existing ones.

The project for the implementation of new architecture always requires high labour input. It is necessary to find the best product, turn to the design practice, opportunities for integration of the selected product with existing solutions from other manufacturers, provide IT personnel with training in the skills of working with new apps / technologies and ensure first-class service and support. Such decisions are often well-considered: the company buys a long-term asset, investing money for the future (in the hope of getting not just a technical solution, but capital).


Certainly, every decision that’s made, especially related to "something new" carries on certain risks or possible negative consequences. At this moment, elementary psychology is turning on, which is absolutely normal. It is very difficult for people in the modern world, overloaded with information and events, not to experience anxiety, fear and a natural phobia of the unknown. That is why most companies choose the path of the least resistance - they turn to "already proven" manufacturers, because then the risks are reduced to zero.

But as we know from life practice and the laws of the universe, you can only get perfect if you are willing to dig deep, transform, "look under the bonnet", try and be flexible.


Primary research performed by IDC in 2019 indicates, that 61.2% of enterprises with approved vendor lists feel that these lists constrain them in their ability to select optimal solutions.This raises an interesting question: why do enterprise storage customers stay in vendor relationships that don't seem to meet their needs??

Enterprises look to establish relationships with storage vendors because long term relationships sometimes deliver informal benefits: administrators are trained on a vendor's system, it can be easier to get trained on subsequent features and releases than switch to a completely different vendor.


In the same time, 55.6% of enterprises noted that they have removed suppliers from their "approved vendor" lists, primarily for one of the following reasons::

  • An "unforgivable failure" like loss of data integrity, a lengthy outage, or an unresolved support issue.
  • Continued poor quality of customer support over time.


There are companies, which are only partially satisfied, but for one reason or another continue to stay with that vendor. A customer may not be happy, but if their perception is that the potential benefits of a move don't outweigh the risks and/or costs of making the move, it's easier to just stay with a mediocre solution..

However, permanent dissatisfaction with a storage solution or technical support often boils down to an inability to meet performance or availability SLAs, which involves enormous irreversible consequences for business. Switching to a system that can meet all the requirements becomes the only right decision.


In the innovative variety of product solutions in the IT world, it becomes clear that it is futile to always follow the technological path of one vendor, and it is very necessary to refocus on business logic. The use of new technologies, like solid-state media, software-defined design, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and granular byte-level locking, offer the only way to improve company's economics and, on the other hand, to mitigate deployment and operational riskthat may not be available in legacy storage.

Stop cyclically changing burning systems that have failed and move to the concept of data storage consolidation, which will create long-term profits and be the foundation for future success! When an enterprise can retire two, three, or even four separate systems by moving to a system specifically architected to deliver performance at scale with multi-petabyte capacities, this produces a multiplicative effect on cost savings. By centralizing management, it boosts administrative productivity, and performance and availability are brought at scale needed to cost-effectively meet a broad set of SLAs.


A second important factor to consider is the total cost of technology ownership. Apart from the upfront purchase price, enterprises need to consider administrative ease of use (and associated new training costs), ability to integrate into new paradigms (like containers and cloud) that will be deployed, ongoing maintenance costs, data migration facilities, and the overall efficiency of the new storage. More efficient designs can significantly increase performance density, which allows much smaller systems that use less energy and floor space to handle an enterprise's workloads.


Vendors with storage systems that can enable denser storage consolidation, along with the other risk minimization features mentioned above, can offer an extremely compelling reason to switch vendors.

For example, enterprise storage solutions from progressive vendor Infinidat can offer such characteristics.In addition, the vendor supports its systems performance and availability guarantees,which is one of the indicators that the manufacturer is confident in its ability to meet any business requirement.

With Infinidat you can forget about growing discontent about technical support, experience the strong economic benefit that comes with lower total cost of ownership (TCO),and get petabyte-scale technologynot available from other vendors, allowing you to move to a much better level of operations.


iIT Distributionas Infinidat's official distributor,drawing on independent research, guarantees a smooth, and most importantly, painless transition and data migration to Infinidat storage systems and reminds: to see something new, you have to do something new!


Material was based on the article Infinidat.

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