As organisations reassess how and where their data lives, the move back to on‑premise storage is becoming more than an infrastructure choice; it’s a strategic pivot toward cost control, performance, and resilience.
In this edition, Josh Hobbs, our Vendor Manager, shares three practical use cases showing why modern on‑prem solutions like HPE Alletra are gaining momentum and where they deliver real‑world impact.
Hands up if you remember the early days of applications hosting? For people who entered the tech industry recently, it might surprise them to know it goes back to the early ‘90s, but for those who have been around for a while, it’s almost reassuring to see the cyclical nature of IT operations. Of the organisations that were early adopters of hosted applications, some will have stayed, some returned to on‑premise before moving to the current hyperscalers and others have their hearts set on hybrid.
Moving forward doesn’t mean always travelling in a straight line – if we take the mindset of CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous delivery) we know that reviewing previous actions and processes is valuable, and each iteration brings its own improvements.
And, given the way we do business is becoming ever more flexible, it’s important to know we have a choice when managing our infrastructure – which is why there’s an increasing level of interest in the newest wave of HPE Alletra on‑premise storage.
As the topic of a ‘return to on‑prem’ has stood out to the team at Storm as an area of emerging importance, I thought I’d share three use cases based on some recent customer projects and conversations.
Public cloud is often talked about using language similar to that of utilities – ‘always on’, ‘pay for what you use’ etc. And, in the same way that we are all re‑evaluating our energy bills and using technology like smart meters to help us understand and minimise spend, organisations are applying greater scrutiny to their cloud usage and associated bills.
In some instances, pricing and modelling changes implemented by public cloud vendors have meant solutions that previously made commercial sense are no longer producing value for money. In other scenarios, customers have decided they need to bring greater control or predictability to their infrastructure costs via a return to a CapEx or fixed‑price subscription payment model.
Organisations operating in regulated industries or with unique workloads should not be precluded from achieving the speed, scale and agility gains associated with public cloud.
For many of our customers, data modelling is central to their business success – they need the ability to manage heavy workloads that crunch huge data sets and deliver immediate results – but they can’t place them in the public cloud. Thanks to advances in on‑premise infrastructure storage and management as seen with HPE Alletra + InfoSight, it’s now possible to automate, optimise and deliver 6x9 availability from the comfort of your own four walls – and without needing a range of specialists sat in the same building.
Alongside these gains, HPE Alletra allows you to connect to Azure and AWS which means that whether you’re solely on‑prem, or have a hybrid model, you can design an infrastructure that delivers cloud‑like performance and results regardless of where your data sits.
During the pandemic lots of organisations invested significantly in End User Computing to ensure that business could run smoothly regardless of where employees were (or had to be) located. Today, they’re owners of hybrid environments that have come together out of necessity rather than a strategic plan.
The opportunity with Alletra is to deliver a disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) which offers business‑critical speed and resiliency alongside independent scaling of compute and storage. Or, in more simple terms, you get a consolidation of platforms that simplifies your infrastructure while improving performance and reducing cost.
The beauty of the HPE Alletra range is that whether you’re looking for the security of knowing exactly what you’re going to pay using a CapEx model, or if you’d prefer to use the GreenLake Storage as a Service subscription, you’ll get the same great results.
To assess which solution would be right for you, I’d recommend booking in some time with our team who are on hand to listen to your short, medium and long‑term goals before making a recommendation.
Call us on +44 (0) 1923 801080 or email info@storm.tech