Authored by: Devika Garg, PhD, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager for Analytics at Pure Storage
We have more data at our fingertips than ever before, providing businesses the opportunity to accelerate analytics, unlock intelligence, and lead in the digital economy. Data-driven decisions are revolutionizing how companies improve, manufacture, and distribute their goods and services. However, this access to data doesn’t come without its operational complexities.
Despite the recognized importance of accelerating analytics and real-time data utilization, a recent IDC report reveals that 42% of enterprises underutilize data, with as few as 12% successfully connecting customer data across departments. As IT leaders, how can we effectively harness this vast amount of data to maximize its value, break down silos, and gain faster time to insights? The answers lie in modern data pipelines with flexible infrastructure.
Tapping into the Benefits of a Modern Data Pipeline
Automation and orchestration are two of the hallmarks of a data pipeline enabling data-driven business decisions – helping to ensure the smooth flow of data, breaking down silos, and eliminating bottlenecks that lead to slowed analytics and loss of data value.
Full data pipeline automation allows organizations to seamlessly integrate data from various sources to fuel business applications and analytics, deliver real-time data quickly, and scale cloud-based solutions. Orchestration enables centralized management and end-to-end control of data pipelines.
Yet a data pipeline is only as efficient and effective as its constituent parts. A single weak or broken link can break the entire pipeline and lead to a large amount of lost investment and time. To make the most out of a data environment for in-place analytics and faster time to insights, the supporting IT infrastructure is a critical foundational layer. The secret ingredient to success at the heart of it all is modern data storage.
Unleashing the Value of Data With Advanced Infrastructure
The technologies that comprise modern data analytics pipelines have changed dramatically over the past few decades, wholly affecting the infrastructure required to support them. Newer technologies include support for File and Object Store protocols, enabling centralized storage instead of Direct Attached Storage (DAS), and avoiding application silos that lack agility and real-time performance.
Investing in infrastructure solutions like Pure Storage, with an optimized data persistence layer and simplified data storage, can empower newer analytics environments and achieve more data-driven business decisions. Pure Storage streamlines data management, provides high-performance, consolidated storage infrastructure for faster insights, and gives real-time analytics with predictable performance.
Storage Architecting for Analytics Success
IT leaders must accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of their business stakeholders by pursuing an infrastructure modernization strategy in lockstep with application transformation.
To make the most out of modern data pipelines, a suitable storage infrastructure solution should feature modern architectures, enable flexible consumption, and accelerate business innovation. Disaggregating compute and storage scaling allows for efficient hosting of multiple analytics applications, streamlined scalability with data growth, and reduced implementation time for greater efficiency. The solution should offer operational ease with flexibility to scale up or down to fit business needs and meet ESG goals.
For example, Pure Storage’s consolidated storage platform, FlashBlade//S, is built to support data-heavy, unstructured workloads by providing high density, capacity, efficiency, and performance while reducing energy consumption by 85%. At Pure Storage, we’ve developed our solution to contain a modular architecture for independent capacity and performance scaling and Kubernetes-native storage capabilities through Portworx integration, further allowing IT teams to scale and operate from a single pane of glass. Additionally, Pure Storage Evergreen provides non-disruptive upgrades that will enable capacity and performance to scale and minimize over-provisioning without downtime so that IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives.
In the current era of data-driven transformation, IT leaders must embrace complexity by simplifying their analytics and data footprint. Data pipelines allow IT leaders to optimize data and maximize value for faster analytic insights. When paired with the right storage solution, IT leaders can modernize their pipelines and consolidate data into a central and accessible layer – breaking through silos and delivering the real-time insights that drive true business advantage. Modern data analytics fuel digital-first organizations to unlock faster insights – is your infrastructure keeping pace?
