Connected applications have become the lifeblood of business. That’s why we’ve been hearing the term digital transformation so much lately. This term gets to the fact that today every business is a digital business.

Indeed. Businesses use applications to interact and transact with their customers and prospects. And they employ apps to manage their internal operations.

So making sure business applications perform as expected is paramount. And that requires businesses to understand how their applications are performing, how they need them to perform, the gaps between the two, and what they can do to close these gaps.

Traditionally businesses have worked to improve performance by adding CPU or memory, says Greg McDonald. But the Softchoice (News - Alert) solution architect says that only masked performance issues.

Tuning and modifying applications is another way to go, he adds. But that’s time consuming and expensive, he says. Plus it’s risky because it can adversely impact end user experiences, McDonald explains.

A better approach to address application performance assurance and data center resource optimization holistically, McDonald suggests.

That should start with getting a handle on performance gaps and their financial implications for your business, he says. (For example, how many visitors are abandoning your website before making a purchase because it take too long for your online shopping cart to load)?

Then it should involve doing a business survey, a data center tech check and analysis. Then organizations should take a real life workload and replicate it in the new environment to see the results. And their application performance, data center environments, and business strategies should be revisited every few months to measure and adjust as needed – and figure in new or future changes.

Softchoice will work with organizations to explore and implement this holistic approach to application performance and data center optimization, McDonald explains. And it leverages Flash technology from IBM (News - Alert) to do that.

Kosta Makropoulos, advisory client technical specialist at IBM Systems-Storage, says in the past decade there have been huge advances in data center technology performance in bus speed, CPU, DRAM, and network speed. However, disk speed has lagged, he added. But Flash represents a performance increase of 50 times.

“When u look at Flash it really is a gamechanger” he said.

Makropoulos and McDonald are the featured speakers in the webinar “Data Center Modernization: Insights, Misconceptions, and Real-Life Wins with Flash Storage Strategies.” This online event is now available on demand. For more information, and to access this webinar, click here.