5 signs your storage infrastructure is due for an upgrade
Outdated storage risks missed business opportunities and high costs. These five warning signs reveal when it's time to upgrade your organization's NAS or SAN systems.
Upgrading an enterprise's storage infrastructure isn't easy. That's why many managers hesitate before committing to a network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) upgrade. However, sticking with outdated storage that isn't keeping pace with an enterprise's growing data requirements can lead to missed business opportunities, regulatory compliance lapses, and other serious -- and costly -- problems.
The good news is it's relatively easy to tell when a storage infrastructure is running out of steam. Pay attention to these five warning signs to tell if it's time for a NAS or SAN upgrade:
- Complaints about performance are escalating. Administrator and end-user complaints are obvious red flags. The most common cause for these types of complaints is when data retrievals climb from baseline behavior -- milliseconds to seconds -- due to outdated hardware or inefficient protocols like legacy NFS. Bottlenecks in I/O-intensive workloads, such as AI analytics or real time databases, cause application slowdowns, while overburdened storage arrays risk intermittent downtime during peak usage. Managers who fail to improve storage response time and performance might soon find their job security in jeopardy.
- IT staff are overburdened. The last thing an already overwhelmed team needs to be doing is chasing down storage complaints. Legacy storage systems require constant manual tuning to address latency spikes and fragmented data silos, resulting in bottlenecks that necessitate hours of troubleshooting and risk downtime during updates.
- Decentralized IT is escalating. End users and business units are moving workloads to unauthorized cloud platforms or local storage, bypassing failing enterprise storage systems. When an enterprise storage system starts to fail, it leads to IT and business misalignment, creating a rift between business objectives and what the technology can actually deliver.
- Security and ransomware concerns are increasing. Outdated storage systems with slow data recovery protocols delay ransomware restoration by hours or days, extending downtime. This results in compliance breaches, incurring millions of dollars in fines and potentially leading to negative publicity, which erodes end-user or customer trust through lost productivity and revenue from disrupted services.
- The data center is running out of space. Legacy storage resources consume a significant amount of floor space. This can be a serious issue, particularly for data centers that don't have room to spare and could indicate it's time for a NAS or SAN upgrade, where more and faster-performing storage could replace legacy systems with a much smaller rack space footprint.
Embracing modernization
Sooner or later, all enterprises, especially those with private data centers, face warning signs that a NAS or SAN upgrade is critical. Storage modernization is not just a fix for today's problems -- it's a strategic investment in an organization's future. According to Omdia analyst Simon Robinson, storage modernization is driven by megatrends such as AI's increasing dominance in storage infrastructure and the need for enhanced data protection amid rising cyber threats.
Of course, private data centers remain essential for several industries and verticals, particularly those that handle sensitive data, including finance, healthcare and government. Modernizing storage with all-flash arrays, AI-driven automation and hybrid cloud integration transforms these facilities into agile, efficient hubs that drive long-term success. In fact, Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget, forecasts that global mission-critical data center storage will grow to $103 billion by 2028. This is nearly double the current valuation, which is fueled by growing AI workloads and digital transformation. Additionally, cloud replication to platforms like Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage can reduce storage costs and enhance data mobility for private data centers.
Enterprises that modernize their storage infrastructure can achieve the following goals:
- Cost efficiency. Dense all-flash NAS or SAN systems reduce rack space and lower energy costs, while AI automation reduces administrative overhead, delivering significant operational cost savings.
- Risk reduction. Immutable snapshots enable rapid ransomware recovery, reducing recovery time from days to minutes, thereby minimizing downtime and ensuring compliance with stringent regulations.
- Futureproofing. Hybrid cloud integrations and NVMe-oF support exabyte-scale AI and analytics workloads, enabling seamless scaling for emerging technologies like edge computing and generative AI.
- Performance optimization. All-flash arrays deliver significantly lower latency, enhancing application performance for customer-facing services and real time data processing, ultimately improving end-user application satisfaction.
These outcomes empower private data center owners and operators to overcome the most common legacy constraints, ensuring organizations stay competitive, compliant and ready for future demands, including a massive shift into AI.
Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect changes to the storage market.
