Many years ago, IT was seen as a supporting function to many organisations, “a tool to make the business more efficient and, of course, capture and safeguard important data”.

“We evolved from that way of thinking some decades ago to where we are now; now we have IT being very key in the success of many organisations, with many relying on IT to develop, test, launch and market new products,” says Isaac Makoto, Business Development Manager at Data Sciences.

Many organisations are driven by various factors when deciding on how to implement and deploy their IT infrastructure. The need to be quick to market with new products, among others, was one of the key drivers that saw the huge adoption of cloud solutions.

Cloud solutions have seen a huge adoption over the last decade, amid promises of various benefits. Some of the benefits promised and being delivered include.

• Quick IT deployment and thus quick time to market on products;
• Resource flexibility and scalability, leveraging a pool of available resources; and
• Efficiency, resources and costs – use what you need and pay for what you use. 

For a long time, large organisations have deployed centralised IT solutions, allowing them to manage centrally all the aspects of the infrastructure, such as performance tuning, DR, backups, security and procurement of the infrastructure and the associated resources.

While cloud solutions, as promised, brought about various benefits, unfortunately there are drawbacks, some of which seen to date include but are not limited to the following:

• Shadow IT, resulting in security and regulatory concerns;
• Legacy applications that cannot be migrated to the cloud; and
• Data protection strategies, cloud versus on-premises.

This means organisations must leverage both on-premises and public cloud technologies and thus embark on a hybrid cloud strategy, adopting the cloud while still accommodating legacy environments.

IT infrastructure solutions are characterised primarily by, but not limited to, the following elements:

• Compute;
• Networking;
• Storage; and
• Backups.

The Data Sciences team has a wealth of experience in solutions, encompassing but not limited to all the four elements above, with access to specific products that provide end-to-end enterprise solutions covering this space. Three brands I would like to mention that can add value to the journey of the hybrid cloud adoption:

• Pure Storage
• Commvault
• VAST Data

Pure Storage

Pure Storage, a data storage company focused on providing storage for primary application data. It was at the forefront of the adoption of flash arrays in the data centre, moving away from spinning disk technology at a time when flash technology was seen as expensive and reserved only for niche applications if it wasn’t deployed in a tiered architecture.

Pure Storage Cloud Block Store – organisations can deploy a virtual array with all Pure’s functionality on any public cloud platform, enjoy the same benefits as an on-premises deployment and replicate data between the two environments.

Pure Storage Safe-Mode Snapshots – This built-in feature enables the creation of read-only snapshots of production volumes, which cannot be altered, encrypted or deleted. These can be offloaded to a safe location offsite or in the cloud to be retrieved later when needed.

Pure Storage Portworks – Cloud-native applications running in containers such as Kubernetes can be easily provisioned persistent storage with Portworx, by abstracting away the complexity of underlying storage infrastructure and providing a unified storage layer for applications.

Commvault

Commvault, a software company focused on providing data management and protection solutions to enterprise customers. Over three decades in this space and you might be excused if you mistakenly see Commvault as “legacy backup software”. However, over the years, Commvault has proved that “legacy backup software” is a term nowhere near describing the company, as it has continued to be innovative.

Along with providing unmatched solutions for bare metal environments, Commvault, through innovation, provides comprehensive data protection solutions targeted at the cloud.

Cloud Data Management – With this, Commvault helps organisations to move their data between their different cloud platforms, on-premises versus cloud.

Cloud disaster recovery – Customers can automate their DR testing and actual DR across different cloud platforms, providing flexibility all the way to the file level restore.

Cloud Storage – Commvault, in partnership with Microsoft Azure, has launched a cloud backup solution branded Metallic for different requirements, including end-point protection.

VAST Data – “universal storage for all your data”

This company was founded with one aim, to be the next storage platform standard tier with flash, replacing all existing tiers of storage, such as hard drives, across all different environments, including backup data.

While Pure Storage accelerated the adoption of flash into the mainstream production data, VAST Data’s ambitious aim has seen the company accelerating the adoption of flash into the backup space.

With the availability of technologies such as QLC flash, revolutionary data reduction and highly efficient erasure coding, we have seen VAST Data bring flash price points down to palatable levels in the backup space.

Through the scale-out architecture, the system can scale from Petabytes to Exabytes in a single solution with the ability to independently scale capacity versus performance as per the requirements. Ultimately, customers can:

• Accelerate backups at any scale;
• Restore and recover business-critical data and applications in minutes, not days or weeks; and
• Take snapshots of data and offload to S3, with choice of on-premises or the public cloud.

In conclusion, many organisations need hybrid cloud solutions to overcome public cloud problems. Organisations can profit from the cloud while keeping legacy environments by using on-premises and public cloud technologies. Data Sciences can help with compute, networking, storage and backups. Pure Storage, Commvault and VAST Data offer end-to-end enterprise solutions that enhance hybrid cloud adoption. These solutions enable fast IT implementation, resource flexibility, scalability, efficiency and better data protection.

Don’t miss out on the benefits of hybrid cloud solutions. Contact the Data Sciences team today to learn more about how we can assist your organisation in implementing a hybrid cloud strategy and utilising top brands such as Pure Storage, Commvault and VAST Data for improved IT deployment, resource flexibility, scalability, efficiency and data protection. If you would like to have further discussion regarding the topics in this article, please feel free to reach out to Data Sciences Corporation by visiting our website, www.datasciences.co.za.