StorONE

Simplified Enterprise Storage from Oracle and StorONE

September 5, 2019 by StorONE

StorONE and Oracle announced a more efficient, future-ready solution architecture and technology which allows companies to better utilize their IT resources, increase efficiency via application and storage tiering.

The cloud computing technology has been powering the IT transformation for more than a decade now. We have seen major change in the way applications adapt to user demands, scaling up and down to meet business SLA and resiliency, abstracting more and more from the underlying IT infrastructure and resources to drive IT efficiency, scalability and cost saving.

The practice of “doing more with less” continues to evolve and becoming doing “A LOT MORE with MUCH LESS”. Shifting from bare-metal application deployment to virtualization, containerization, serverless and functions force CIO to rethink better ways to transform the business application development and delivery framework to meet shrinking IT budget, improve IT agility, scalability, innovations and adopting new technologies. To achieve most of the IT transformation goals, keeping simplicity at balance is key to unlock the full potential of IT investment and business objectives for now and future.

Software development practices and tooling had gone through a long history of IT technology changes but the application framework seems to lack behind the innovation curve until the cloud computing adoption reached the milestones which without application framework remodeling, business will not able to enjoy the full scale of cloud technology benefits, cost-saving and agility to move business workloads across different cloud technology, be it private or public cloud providers. Companies needs to embark on IT complexity reduction by streamlining the number of development tools or platform used. Such initiative not only can deliver cost savings from integration, management and maintenance overheads, but also lowering the cost and resources required to meet the same business objectives and more efficient application lifecycle management.

Challenges/Issues/Problems

Based on this table from GitLab’s website, if we count the number of tools that exist throughout the application development lifecycle, it is easily overwhelming for even an experienced developer or IT

administrator. Each of the tool comes with different technology stack, UI, user experience and workflow. It is even worst if we start compiling the integration efforts, maintaining them, paying for the software licenses and support. An easy solution to such cluttered IT environment is to streamline current practices on a cost-effective platform provider and re-strategize how the IT resources can be better managed to improve consumptions and ROI.

We may consider the tooling table just the tip of the iceberg. What beneath this is the IT

infrastructure that support the business applications and services. Containers, microservices, serverless, functions and Et Cetera, each of these new technologies is compounding on the already complicated IT architecture. The good news is, not only StorONE and Oracle offer solutions to simplify the application development and delivery layer, but also the underlying IT infrastructure and resources management.

What StorONE and Oracle can offer?

StorONE and Oracle are able to offer a much more efficient, future-ready solution architecture and technology which allows companies to better utilize their IT resources, increase efficiency via application and storage tiering. IT hardware procured 3 to 5 years ago are still capable of running demanding applications like databases. Company may consider redeploying or repurposing the older IT hardware resources for lower business SLA or non-mission critical workloads like web farm or application development testing. Oracle provides Open Source virtualization which is cost effective and allows consolidation and inventory of different IT hardware category into multiple tiers of software-defined datacenter cluster resources. StorONE’s software-defined storage runs natively inside the Oracle virtualization stacks to consolidate storage resources, protect storage media failure, deliver the required storage capacity, performance and protocols for application development and runtime.

A visionary system integrator once shared a holistic vision of a composable data center where compute, storage and network hardware components are no longer taking the center stage of data center. They are simply the commodity building blocks to construct any architecture requirements for business application to be hosted. The ability and flexibility to recompose and scaling IT resources without any constraints are the dream of most CIO in the world, of course not at the expense of IT budget and investments.

In fact, today we see that global initiative like OCP is gaining momentum as every data center players would want to be as cost-effective, scalable and agile as the Facebook’s infrastructure architecture. We encourage people to explore and learn more about their visions and the growing endorsement and participations from many major technology leaders like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM and more.

Conclusion

New technologies and new ways of deploying and running business application will continue to evolve and innovate. What tailing is the new learning curve, adoption and legacy challenges. Every CIO wants to embrace new technologies at ease and not stretching their IT budgets or throwing away what had been invested. To gain great storage performance and capacity with StorONE solution is easy, and to procure the best storage hardware gears in the market is also simple and direct without worrying about high CAPEX and OPEX. Hardware footprint is critical to keep running costs and management overhead to the minimum.

Public cloud is great, but enterprises do not necessarily need to discard what they have built up over the years. Hybrid cloud indeed is the new norm and final goal to reach without going through all the difficulties and spending hefty cost to acquire. A simple strategy to transform the current on-premise resources to be as efficient as the public cloud infrastructure, improve resource utilization and management capability without losing controls on data ownership and privacy could be a viable choice. Keeping infrastructure costs low, have a better private cloud management tool, allow test environment to co-exist as the production without hard isolation, longer infrastructure lifecycle, tiering of business application, last but not least, prioritizing software driven solution over proprietary high cost vendor solutions. All these could have point to a few things, Open source, composable architecture and software driven solutions.

Topics: data storage, S1aaS