Consumption Based Storage Capacity

A New Solution to a Familiar Challenge

IIS creates lasting relationships with its customers. We build trust through understanding their challenges and presenting options for resolving them. Recently one of our loyal customers shared their concern about how to cost-effectively scale their 3PAR storage environment. They are a manufacturing company who is growing through the acquisition of companies that manufacture complementary products.

As they acquire these businesses, they are consolidating the combined IT infrastructure to ensure platform consistency and better manage ongoing support costs. Their challenge is in defining the best model for acquiring incremental unbudgeted storage capacity. Like many other organizations, they want to have enough capacity to fulfill business needs but not so much capacity that they’ve invested valuable capital in underutilized assets.

While the public cloud is always an option for gaining incremental capacity, our customer preferred to maintain control over compliance, privacy, data sovereignty, and security. An on-premise storage solution was the only option they wanted to discuss. Architecting the solution was not the problem. Overprovisioning was. Like many companies, our customer did not want to acquire capacity that would not be used until some point in the future.

IIS suggested learning more about HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity Services.

On-Premise IT with Public Cloud Agility

HPE GreenLake Flexible Capacity is a new business model for provisioning resources in a matter of minutes from a ready-to-use buffer residing in your data center infrastructure. This solution allows customer to only pay for the amount of resource they use. While customers assess their capacity requirements and determine a minimum baseline need, there is no upfront capital outlay. As incremental capacity is required, the buffer is used to fulfill demand. Advanced metering allows HPE to measure monthly usage and invoice the customer for only the amount of resource consumed.

IIS introduced its customer to the HPE team so that they could illustrate how HPE GreenLake could achieve much-needed agility in their data center. The entire team worked together to:

• Jointly defined capacity needs
• Establish a plan to deliver and set up IT resources on-site, including a buffer of extra pay-per-use capacity
• Review how HPE would monitor and measure capacity used
• Confirm support via HPE Datacenter Care*
• Detail monthly based invoicing based on actual storage utilization with no upfront capital expenditures

*HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity includes HPE Datacenter Care. Core features include relationship management, enhanced call handling and environment services. The relationship management team proactively helps to manage the data center environment and address increases or decreases in capacity.

The solution for our customer involved the deployment of one 3PAR StoreServe 8450 Array at each of two datacenters in the United States. Together, we defined initial capacity, at each data center, of approximately 115TB of useable pre- RAID. The key to deriving benefit from HPE GreenLake Flexible Capacity is in estimating ongoing capacity requirements over a defined period of time. We collaborated with our customer to help them define these estimates. The result is that they have access to variable capacity, plus a buffer allowing them to grow as anticipated for the next five years without any capital outlay.

Overall they are managing their cash flow for the next five years and realizing a cost savings of approximately 14%, not including Cost of Capital or operational efficiencies.

Bottom Line

Pursuing this holistic solution helped our customer to create and sustain a storage environment without concern for future operational or financial issues. While extra capacity can be expensive, HPE GreenLake provides a procurement alternative that aligns budget to actual utilization. Lack of capacity is no longer a challenge.

By selecting HPE GreenLake Flexible Capacity our customer was able to fulfill their current storage requirements while simultaneously deploying incremental on-site capacity that will be accessed when needed, as they continue to grow.

The real value for them is that they will only pay for that capacity as they consume it. Our customer has retained the benefit of on-premise storage and gained the flexibility of the cloud in terms of consumption-based payments.