‘It’s the storage speed, dummy.’
Applications are driving the enterprise, whether it is a relatively simple application used by millions of customers or a complex, scalable database that drives an organization’s back end. These applications, and the users that count on them, expect rapid response times. In a world that demands “instant gratification,” forcing a customer, prospect, or employee to wait for a response is the kiss of death.
–George Crump, lead analyst, IT consulting firm Storage Switzerland, LLC
For most data centers, Crump suggests, “the number one cause of these ‘waits’ is the data storage infrastructure, and improving storage performance is a top priority for many CIOs.”
Sound familiar?
It may be challenging for executives who live well outside the IT glass house to think in milliseconds, or to recognize how much speed — which translates directly to application performance — matters. It’s tough enough to wrap our heads around the fractional advantages that accrue to Olympians like Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, much less grasp the arcane benefits of sub-millisecond flash storage to everyday business applications.
