It is certainly a challenging time to be a data center administrator. When it comes to the three pillars that make up you operational environment—Storage, Network and Compute—it is a challenge to determine which is most important and what needs to be migrated first. In reality, all three pillars are critical in successfully migrating to next generation capabilities that will accommodate a world where data transmission and storage needs are exploding, security and compliance are priorities, and the speed of innovation needed to make your operations meet current and future requirements in an unpredictable world are accelerating.

Much of the attention recently has been about initiatives to virtualize enterprise and service provider networks as they look to embrace software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization capabilities.  And, we are all aware of just how fast computing capabilities are progressing.  However, as enterprise data centers and public and private clouds become hyperscale, the question arises as to whether legacy storage capabilities are as future-ready as they need to be. 

The short answer is that in all likelihood, even though many enterprises have adopted the current generation of solid state and general purpose disk arrays and rely on Flash storage in order to become both more agile and faster, the time has come to move to the next generation of storage solutions, particularly the next generation of Flash. 

This issue becomes extremely relevant if you have been a loyal NetApp customer. Founded on simplicity and speed itself two decades ago the cost and complexity of NetApp's c-DOT transition is forcing everyone to take a look at alternatives.

One place they are looking at for a c-DOT replacement is Tegile Systems and its next generation flash-driven storage. In fact, a way to get insight as to why you should be thinking about alternatives to NetApps’s c-DOT at what is a critical juncture in transitioning your data center, and what you need to be thinking about in evaluating as your organization’s next moves regarding storage, is the subject of a forthcoming webinar,  A Simplified and Powerful Alternative to complexities and Cost of Traditional Storage. To be held Friday, August 21, 2015, at 2:00 PM EDT/11:00 AM PST/, you are invited to join me, Richard Moon , Sr. Director of WWO and Corporate IT, CollabNet  and Chris Tsilipounidakis, Manager, Product Marketing, Tegile Systems, as we delve into CollabNet’s decision to move from NetApp to Tegile.  

Subjects to be covered include: 

• The benefits of high performance AFA and hybrid arrays
• Best economics with high density flash and in-line data reduction
• Unified block and file in every product
• Cost effective flash and hybrid data protection
• The wide database certification roster of Tegile Systems

There is little doubt that in all three pillars of the data center that we have come to a tipping point in terms of the urgency of moving to next generation capabilities. In the next several months IT departments around the world will be looking at what can and should come next as they migrate to next generation Storage, Compute and Networking capabilities. The interesting thing is that they all require significant evaluation and also coordination as data center transformations must be done holistically. In this respect Storage is critical since it is about data at rest and its accessibility.