All-Flash Data Centers: Realize the Value of Data

In my previous posts, I covered the basics of what the all-flash DC is and how it can help speed up your digital transformation (DX) journey. If you’ve not done so already, check them out first to get up to speed.

1. All-Flash Data Centers: Turning Your Data Green
2. All-Flash Data Centers: Accelerating Your Digital Transformation

In this post, I’ll explore what data means for your enterprise and how you can derive value from it.

Data: A Valuable Asset for All Enterprises

Simply put, data is the driving force of enterprise development. Its value mainly lies in supporting the following key points:

• Corporate Decision-Making and Business Goal Setting

Data helps you gain insights into how society is developing and market trends so you can make and optimise strategic deployments in key areas.

• Business Development

Data mining and analytics help to provide resources for the development and release of next-generation business, accelerating business operations, implementation, and iteration while also boosting your ability to process business flows.

• Product and Service Innovation

Data enables you to achieve product and service innovation, optimisation, and rapid iteration. It also helps you accurately deliver customised products and services, and boost your chances of success.

• Optimisation of Customer Experience

Data helps you gain insights into your customers so that you can provide them with customised services and achieve customer excellence.

• Innovation at Scale

Data empowers large-scale business innovation. By forming a data-centric insight mechanism, optimising management processes, and integrating resources, you will be able to create differentiated values for customers and build core competitiveness.

Data is the new means of production and an important asset for enterprises. To enhance your future competitiveness, it’s vital that you be innovative in terms of data. Across the board, we’re seeing more enterprises setting key performance indicators (KPIs) around informatisation construction and data innovation. For example, they’re allocating at least 40% of their IT budget to DX  initiatives, approving at least 40% of DX initiatives for implementation, and ensuring these initiatives influence at least 40% of their revenue or profit growth.

As data becomes more and more important for enterprise development, how much you are able to digitally transform will depend on how well you can utilise the value that data contains. Your future competitiveness hinges on your ability to not only identify and obtain data, but also fully explore and realise its value. Consequently, it’s essential to build a data-driven culture centring on data management, Data as a Service (DaaS), and data analytics.

Data-Driven Digital Economy

The digital economy is growing. In fact, it’s booming. By 2022, forecasts show that 65% of global GDP will be digitalised. Enterprises that want to succeed in the future will need to strictly follow the digital path, where they can scale their digital operations and outpace traditional businesses in terms of innovation.

Things such as explosive data growth, diverse data types, higher data transmission and processing requirements, and increasingly complex data management are drastically changing how enterprises generate, collect, transmit, process, store, and manage data. This gives rise to the need for a future-facing digital infrastructure that is intelligent, autonomous, and oriented towards multi-cloud architecture. To collect, process, and store data effectively and extract its value in order to create a better experience for customers, it will be necessary to integrate digital and physical channels.

A survey by IDC shows that more than 90% of enterprises plan to upgrade their digital IT infrastructure. In this process, data innovation is both a pressing need and a challenge. As future data centres develop towards all-flash, they will enable enterprises to maximise the value of data innovation. The all-flash DC will provide strong support for the development of your enterprise and meet its data-related needs.

More enterprises are recognising the value of DX and hoping to take concrete action that can unlock the value of their data. As the digital economy continues to evolve, they will gradually achieve intelligent autonomy — adopting new computing architectures, human-machine convergence, distributed services — and new business forms and patterns will emerge, bringing more possibilities for product and service innovation.

In the digital economy, data is the lifeblood for sustainable digital development. It becomes the carrier of the virtual world and augments the physical world. From a global perspective, all countries and regions recognise that data is more than just a product of the digital era — it is the fuel that drives the development of the digital economy, a country, and the enterprises within that country.

Data: Critical for Business Success

In today’s interconnected world, data is everywhere and often customised, requiring real-time transmission and processing. According to IDC, for data to be regarded as “real-time data”, it needs to be acted upon, reacted to  within 2 seconds. Such data might derive from sensors, financial transactions, and drones.. Being able to respond in real time is something that can help improve your core competitiveness.

As more of the services we use for work, entertainment, and everyday life move online, more enterprises are producing better digital products and services for digital collaboration, aiming to improve their competitiveness. In turn, this gives rise to huge volumes of data — from insights into your customers to information about your daily operations. It’s easy to store this data away for some future use that may never materialise. Some of your competitors may even do this, but for you to get ahead of the competition, you need to transform stored data into actionable data.

You need to extract its value.

Enterprise DX has brought with it a huge surge of data and made data sources and structures much more complex. At first blush, this might seem daunting. Some might even bury their heads in the sand and ignore the importance of data. But take the right approach — often one that is far simpler than previously imagined — and you’ll be set on the road to future success.

Intelligent platforms should be a central part of that approach, as they will help you maximise the value contained within your data. The integration of emerging technologies, such as AI and IoT, are also vitally important.

For example, AIOps (AI for IT operations) is the practice of applying big data and predictive AI/machine learning technologies to various IT operations and management processes. This enables IT systems to detect anomalies, predict failures, and recommend corrective actions. It also empowers such systems to perform self-tuning, autonomous IT provisioning, load balancing, data migration, patching, and more.

By building AIOps into your enterprise, you will be able to detect correlations, anomalies, and patterns, and proactively predict infrastructure health, capacity requirements, and performance changes. Again, data will play a vital role here, as most AIOps-enabled tools require large amounts of relevant data and training to become more effective in identifying normal and abnormal patterns. And thanks to innovations in data flow processing technologies for continuous data analysis, higher levels of automated learning will become possible.

The all-flash DC enables you to consolidate workloads onto fewer platforms due to its higher infrastructure density while also reducing management costs and complexity as well as delivering higher unit performance and reliability. It not only provides a reliable means to store your valuable data, but also delivers near-instant access to such data so that you can make informed decisions immediately. Data — and crucially the way you utilise it — will continue to play a much more important role in all aspects of how your enterprise functions, from interacting with customers to developing products to daily operations.

In my next post, I’ll explore some of the key technologies involved in not only the all-flash DC, but also in DX too. In the meantime, check out some of the other posts on Huawei Blog.

This post is adapted from the Huawei-sponsored IDC White Paper Moving Towards an All-Flash Data Center Era to Accelerate Digital Transformation.

Read More:

• All-Flash Data Centers: A Win for Green Transition & Bottom Lines
• Are You Ready to Lead Storage Network Innovation?
• All-Flash Data Centers for the Intelligent Age

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.