VIOLIN Insights

For so long, jokes about storing data “in the cloud” were all too common. But cloud computing has become a mainstay in how we do business, and how we store data. So much so, that 74% of tech chief financial officers say that cloud computing has had the most measurable impact on their business, according to the folks at Forbes.

Flash storage for enterprise storage systems is quickly becoming the storage entity of choice for many businesses-- especially those who have high-performance needs, or those who use apps for things like accessing or storing to databases or operating artificial intelligence.

Conversations about enterprise data management used to focus mostly on terabytes, but that conversation is changing.

IT administrators and architects are constantly balancing the needs of applications with the cost to provide the best services possible. Flash storage technology has been at the forefront of this trade-off between cost and benefit for several years, but has recently become more affordable for more applications in the datacenter.

One of the services Collier IT offers to our customers is Oracle licensing optimization, especially at the core technology (Database) tier. Some of the triggers for this are mergers, acquisitions, license audits, or budget cuts.

All communications in an application stack generally take a few microseconds. Some take a few milliseconds which results in higher latency also known as long tail latency.

Collier IT customers have been embracing CISC-based solutions for a number of years, with chip architectures ranging from x86 to AMD to x64. Performance of these systems continues to improve with core count and memory size. Architectures vary from single systems with attached storage to converged infrastructure systems with extremely fast (and expensive) storage options.

Whether your company runs on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, MySQL, IBM Informix, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB, your database is a complex machine that relies on maintenance to function well. A database health check is essential to identify problematic sections so you can enhance your database in the areas that aren’t operating at their fullest potential.

Collier IT has extensive experience guiding customers through modernization utilizing converged infrastructure solutions. In a number of cases, this process revolves around licensing cost sustainability as well as price/performance of low-end converged infrastructure, virtualized blades, and high-end converged infrastructure. Recently, the release of the new RISC processors has generated interest to see how they might compare in this type of evaluation.

Sometimes the best way to advance the state of technology is to return to past architectures. I call this approach "back to the future" innovation.v