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Have you ever heard of the redwoods? These magnificent trees are some of the oldest and tallest in the world. They can live for over 2,000 years and can tower over 300 feet.  Traditional RAID storage is like the redwoods of the data jungle, continuously evolving to support both legacy enterprise applications and modern cloud-native applications, while effortlessly matching demands of scale-up and scale-out storage.  Both have stood the test of time, thriving in adverse conditions - and their adaptability is a lesson in survival.

Traditional RAID storage and redwoods: How are they similar?

Experience

Redwoods are unique evergreen trees. They are highly adaptable as their treetop needles are different from the ones on lower branches to accommodate differences in moisture and light. Their shallow root systems extend several dozen yards from the base and intertwine with other redwood trees, offering better strength to withstand strong winds, earthquakes, storms and prolonged flooding. They also grow very fast, have thick barks and are rich in tannins- making them resistant to fire, insects and rot.

Traditional RAID storage is akin to the redwoods; they too support a mix of storage technologies that can be combined to match different data storage requirements:

• Hybrid Storage: Ideal balance of capacity, price and performance
• All-Flash Storage: Optimal price/performance
• NVMe All-Flash Storage: Extreme performance with minimal latency for the most demanding applications

Evolve

The data jungle contains different trees, shrubs and even weeds, but the redwoods are one of a kind. They don’t grow overnight; they too start as tiny plants that mature into towering trees over time.

Your storage investment in traditional RAID storage is similar: what may start as small budget allocation for hybrid or flash storage can grow to become an indispensable part of your data center. Data storage that delivers the highest levels of storage performance and reliability - helping you collect, consolidate and harvest data to transform it into real insight.

Adopting traditional RAID storage and integrating this into your data center infrastructure can accelerate your digital transformation journey. It can help you to predict market trends and customer preferences, run your business applications uninterrupted, have smarter storage management and guarantee business continuity.

Discover the business perspective on traditional storage

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In its native mountain rainforest habitats and humid tropics, the rainbow eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta) is one of the fastest growing trees on earth. High levels of rainfall allow the tree to grow at an impressive speed – both in height and in width.

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) grows rapidly, too, but rather than being dependent on a constant flow of water, it feeds on the data stream. The flood of data is what urged the IT industry to develop Software-Defined Storage – a solution to grow in capacity as well as in performance – with ease.

The pace of growth is not the only beauty of the rainbow tree and SDS. Are you curious to explore the rainbow of Software-Defined Storage? The legend says that there is a treasure hidden at the end of the rainbow…

Software-Defined Storage: The Rainbow tree of the data jungle

Experience

Thanks to its rapid growth and the suitability of its fibers for paper production, rainbow eucalyptus is cultivated on plantations. But its uses don’t stop there. The rainbow tree is also cultivated as an ornamental plant in gardens and parks, thanks to the exceptional coloring of its bark. It is smooth and brownish colored, but because cracks develop in it year after year, the bright green bark underneath is revealed, which progresses through a color spectrum from bright blue and violet to orange and fire red, before becoming yellowish-brown. It is this colorful bark, with its ever-changing appearance, which gave the rainbow tree its name.

SDS also offers more than just the capacity for growth, even if this is its most well-known feature. The treasure of SDS – at the end of the rainbow – is that it not only supports new-age workloads and cloud-native apps, but is originally designed for such environments.
New age workloads being written today stress their underlying systems and storage in quite different ways from yesterday’s monolithic and client-server apps. Examples include:

• use of micro-services to provide flexibility
• use of containers for deployment
• making extensive use of APIs

Cloud-native apps appear in their millions every year and require a fast response to changing conditions. SDS fits well into such an IT environment, where a major challenge is the need to support many workloads that may change dramatically over short periods of time – just as the composition of various colors of the rainbow tree changes every year and never looks the same.

Specifics of Software-Defined Storage - and how it can help

Evolve

The capability of the rainbow eucalyptus to multiply and spread is also impressive. About 1 g of dry seeds produces thousands of seedlings. Distributed by rivers they grow densely crowded. Similarly, SDS grows following the stream of data from the datacenter core, to the edge, and to the cloud.

Nonetheless, there are certain things to be considered: The rainbow tree grows fast, but not everywhere. So the plants cannot tolerate frost. Also SDS will not flourish everywhere. It is unlikely to fit all the possible storage requirements, and traditional storage systems still have an important role to play.

No IT strategy stays fixed, as business needs and storage technologies evolve. SDS has now matured to the degree that it is ready for widespread usage, so the question should be “Where and when does it make sense for you to bring it into your enterprise?”.

Changing storage requirements and the case for SDS

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Have you ever been in a Japanese garden? These beautiful gardens are carefully planned, and the perfect harmony of the stones, moss, water and trees make it a place you want to linger and relax. One of the most beautiful plants you find in a Japanese garden is the colorful maple tree that creates the tranquil atmosphere in the garden. An HCI solution is similar: multiple elements like compute, storage and network are put together to form a perfect harmonious solution.

The value of HCI solutions

Experience

When you‘re walking through a Japanese garden you can enjoy the tranquil atmosphere that is common to all Japanese gardens. Nevertheless, there are differences in how the gardens are designed. No garden is identical to any another. There are thousands of Japanese maple varieties: three species are commonly called Japanese maple - Acer japonicum, Acer palmatum and Acer shirasawanum. But it is not only the components of the garden that vary, but also the overall garden design. The way the trees, stones, moss and water are combined follows the individual view and preference of the owner.

Similarly, HCI systems are set up to solve the demands of the customer’s IT landscape. The results may be different, but all solutions provide an integrated, pre-tested, pre-certified combination of servers, storage, network connectivity and software ensuring governance requirement. This allows you to find the calm in chaos in your journey to data-driven enterprise.

What you need to know when planning your hybrid future

Evolve

Even if it appears, a Japanese Garden is not a self-contained, isolated eco-system. It needs to be embedded in it‘s environment and the related conditions around it can influence it. For example wheather conditions influence how much a garden has to be maintained. In areas with little rain, some plants will survive better and others have to be watered to survive which puts an extra workload on the gardener.

On a first view HCI appears as a complete encapsulated solution in a box. Nonetheless it has to interact with the customer’s data center landscape and to be aligned with his individual business needs. In this context, it’s not always the technical components that are the decisive factor: sometimes the professional services or included software licenses can become the key buying factor.

Fujitsu offers different HCI solutions based on Vmware, Microsoft Azure Stack or Nutanix and it has the expertise to advise in individual customer situations.

Learn more about HCI solutions from Fujitsu

Experience

Your journey can be free of hurdles – if you are well prepared and have planned for all the possible contingencies and threats. Baobab trees are known to resist drought, fire, and turmoil. They are a perfect companion when you run out of water on your trip. In an era of digital transformation, data backup is like a baobab – agile, frugal, and resilient. Enable your business to withstand data threats, mitigate risks, and enhance performance with robust and reliable backup.

• Like the baobab, Fujitsu’s data storage is not only agile and versatile, but can also be easily integrated to – and managed from – any kind of IT environment. The data protection solution from Fujitsu lets you transform your experience into a genuine enabling force for digital business growth, efficiency, and continuity. The baobab tree has survived for millenia, while providing the essentials of food, water and shelter to those in its environment. Importantly, Fujitsu’s data backup is also multifaceted and designed to suit your specific IT environment:
• Backup appliance – Consolidation and simplification of backup operations
• Backup software – Increases operational efficiencies
• Tape system – Cost-effective and helps thwart cyber-threats

Experience

The structure of the dragon tree is seemingly inverted with a densely packed crown and leaves only at the very top of the tree. Its unique shape allows the tree to take up less space on the ground, thus begging a comparison to data archiving: the business insights and decision-making power derived through analysis emerge from the volumes of archived data. Furthermore, archiving data efficiently saves storage space and lets your business systems run more optimally.

Did you know that the resin of the dragon blood tree has been used as a powerful health supplement for centuries? Indeed, it is a little known fact and makes the tree a hidden gem. In the same way, data archiving has vast potential business benefits. Apart from satisfying regulatory compliance and demands of eco-efficiency, archived data lets you reuse the old data and makes it a value enabler for businesses. Furthermore, you can optimize the operational efficiency and confidently meet SLAs of the storage systems. Fujitsu data archive solution includes:

• Archive appliance – Simplify archive operations
• Archive software – Discover unstructured data
• Tape system – Cost-effective long-term data retention