Data, Data, Everywhere – How Can You Store and Protect it?

David Reynolds, Phoenix’s Infrastructure Solutions Specialist, discusses the storage options organisations can look at and why it’s very much not a case of one size fits all …

“In the last nine months, since joining Phoenix, I’ve seen a lot of different approaches to data in its protection, day-to-day management and deciding where it should live – on-premise, cloud or hybrid. Limited funds need to go further to provide essential services instead of using data to make money as I saw in the corporate world. However, one thing that has remained the same, is the complexity of what customers have in place to keep data flowing around their campuses, council buildings and offices. Complexity brings cost and cutting through this complexity is often a problem when starting to look at what comes next and what it will take for an organisation to get to there.

When starting a conversation with a customer that is in the early days of an infrastructure refresh or transformation project, it becomes clear that getting the information about what is happening within their infrastructure is difficult. How long data has resided in a particular tier of storage? Is networking performance a bottleneck to dataflow? How much data is duplicated? The ICT teams, in some cases, can be small or don’t have the tools to easily find these answers. Alternatively, the member of staff with all the answers might be off work leaving them unable to make the most of these initial discussions.

These are all challenges I see within organisations that are thinking about making change and taking those first steps. It looks very daunting from the other side of the table, but we think we can help make it easier in terms of finding these answers and providing options that align with your goals over the next few years and beyond.

So, how do I get to where I want to be?

As long as we gain the right context of how the infrastructure has been run, and the aspirations of those looking to take it forward, we have various assessments that allow us to build a picture of what it will takes to get from where your infrastructure is now to where you want it to be in the future.

We start with an initial discovery workshop which covers not only your existing hardware and technology, but also touches on your organisations future plans and aspirations. Our Infrastructure Solution Specialists can then provide you with an outline of various real-world options available to you. Typically, we can provide overviews of similar solutions we have implemented for comparable organisations with the various merits and pitfalls outlined all while ensuring the solutions discussed meet with your organisations budgets and vision. We deliver this with our Explorer Assessment for infrastructure and Protector Assessment for backup, replication and availability solutions.

These initial assessments work where you already have a vision of how your project might take shape but need some assistance in making that vision reality.

What if I need more guidance?

With a completely blank slate, we can offer a more transformational piece of consultancy by gaining a long-term and holistic view of your business.  We take a deep-dive into your organisation at a business, infrastructure and application level creating a 3-year strategy with you. This provides you with valuable insights and a joined-up solution that solves day-to-day data management and resource provision. Alternatively, you might need data protection or the flexibility to host your key applications and services on the platform that suits your organisation wherever it is on its journey. We call this strategic approach Transform Assessment.

Whichever level of assistance you need from us, Phoenix have the experience and knowledge to deliver strategic results.

As a VMware Premier Partner, we believe that their solutions give you freedom of choice in terms of performance or capacity profiles. Solutions such as VMware vSAN or the use of VVols to ease storage systems with per VM policy management, gives the look and feel of a public cloud data centre with great levels of responsiveness, security and data protection.

In terms of providing a more bespoke solution, our assessments allow us to combine many years of infrastructure and data management experience to illustrate the benefits of hyper-convergence, where appropriate, or a more traditional architecture when needed.”