Software-Defined Storage Lets Financial Firms Compete in Today’s Market

InformationWeek sat down with Jason Brown, consultant product marketing manager, software-defined storage (ScaleIO), at Dell EMC, to discuss the data-related challenges facing all CIOs at financial firms, as well as how an agile infrastructure and superior data center life-cycle management can help financial services companies compete in today’s marketplace.

What do you consider to be the biggest challenges facing the financial services industry?

One of the biggest challenges is data growth. Today, the way people interact with financial institutions is more online and more data driven, causing an explosion in the amount of data that needs to be stored, analyzed, and protected. If a site goes down or data is lost, there are legal, financial, as well as PR and brand implications. What’s more, financial services companies often have more scrutiny regarding data because of government regulations and their impact on the overall economy. As such, financial services organizations need to reduce risk, especially around data loss and data availability, while still providing the proper infrastructure to support data growth — at as low a cost as possible.

Another big challenge for financial organizations is the explosion of application development and DevOps. Banks and financial services institutions need to be able to come out with new applications and services in record time. This allows banks to generate more revenue for their companies and provide customers the best customer experience that they can.

How can technology help financial firms meet these challenges?

There are two ways to address these needs: 1) reduce cost on the back end by simplifying the data center and storage life-cycle management; 2) become more agile and develop new applications and services to generate revenue.

We have made a lot of big advances in technology to help with data growth. Not only do we have new technology to enhance agility and flexibility, we also have the ability to simplify the data center. By simplifying the data center, companies can move away from cumbersome and monolithic infrastructure that drives IT budgets higher and reduces the efficiency of IT workers.

When simplified data centers consist of common storage components, such as x86 servers and Ethernet, it allows for more cost-efficient, easier infrastructure procurement and support. Companies are also trying to change the model of how to deploy, manage, and retire storage, a process known as storage life-cycle management. By optimizing storage life-cycle management, financial firms can drive down IT costs associated with these tasks.

Financial firms are starting to mimic companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter by using technologies such as server-based storage and moving to more common networking around Ethernet. This enables them to use software-defined storage to bring all these things together — essentially maintaining the levels of service they had and even increasing the levels of service, while still maintaining the high data availability and protection they need.

Software-defined storage (SDS) abstracts, pools, and automates server-based storage to enable financial firms to operate with ruthless efficiency. It is a great mechanism to help them facilitate their cost-reduction goals, simplify storage life-cycle management, and provide the agility needed by application developers.  

The one common theme that runs through all of today’s challenges is data. How can financial firms optimize their data storage and management?

SDS is the wave of the future. It is being used by financial institutions because standardizing on hardware components costs less. It allows them to be more agile and more flexible, and it frees up IT resources to be proactive instead of reactive. That’s a big win for financial firms — while still maintaining that level of data protection, high availability, and enhanced security they need.

Being able to deploy software-defined storage on x86 standard servers allows a company to grow in small or very large increments. Having a pay-as-you-go model provides a lot of financial agility as well. Financial institutions need this agility because it helps them generate additional revenue from what they are implementing in the back end.

In addition, you can’t underestimate the burden of operational activities such as tech refresh. Because of the efficiencies gained, SDS can eliminate tech refresh activities such as capacity planning and data migrations. Think about the pain associated with these tasks: you have a year-long planning process, you have to migrate applications off storage, and then you need to bring in the new hardware and do a data migration. This typically takes weeks to months in terms of monitoring the system and paying extra for those services. Being able to reduce not only capex but also opex costs with SDS is huge — especially when IT budgets aren’t increasing.

How can financial services firms get started with software-defined storage?

There are a few ways. First and foremost, get educated. There is a plethora of training, documentation, websites, demos, and material to help people learn about the technology. Even better: talk to an expert who has experience working with SDS. There are also a lot of hands-on resources to try out these technologies, such as a virtual labs, proof-of-concepts, and free trials.

When you’re ready to buy, start small and grow with it. One of the benefits of software-defined storage is you can start small and grow on your own terms. We’re not expecting customers to replace their entire infrastructure with software-defined storage on day one. But, if they create a software-defined storage infrastructure and start with one application — maybe a DevOps app where they create new services, and start using it and becoming comfortable with it — then they start to realize the value and can start migrating other applications over, or retire some of that older traditional infrastructure within their data center. The fact is that SDS is very scalable and agile.

Now, if you want to buy large out of the gate, perhaps to build a private cloud to support multiple departments/business units within a financial services firm, SDS can easily support that as well. That’s the magic of software-defined storage!