As highlighted in the recent report from the INI Group, Analysis of IT at the Retail Store, it is clear that enterprise IT are primarily taking 1 of 2 paths in the development of their distributed IT infrastructure.
To provide improved management of their distributed infrastructure, many organizations are centralizing their data and applications at the datacenter and/or public cloud. Although this is very cost effective and provides central IT with more control, it leaves the business vulnerable to extended downtime across the board. If a site loses connection to the datacenter and/or cloud it will have no/limited access to applications required to do business. Even worse, if the datacenter/cloud goes down, your entire network goes down with it.
There are also many looking at decentralization to give distributed sites more independence from central IT by hosting business critical data and applications on-site. Although this method ensures uptime, it is very costly to implement, support and maintain as typically traditional physical storage solutions, such as Storage Area Networks (SANs), are utilized at each location.
StorMagic’s SvSAN provides the best of both worlds by enabling organizations to achieve affordable high availability at their distributed sites while maintaining management from central IT. See howa large big box retailer did just that and saved over $10m on hardware cost alone across their 2200 sites.