Since the world turned upside down with COVID, McKinsey & Company has been tracking the sentiments of US small and mid-size businesses (SMB). These statistics show that 57% of SMBs report a lack of customers or do not know when customers will come back, and 84% of SMBs say the Coronavirus has negatively impacted their income.
Small and mid-sized businesses are already enduring so many challenges in the wake of COVID. Downtime doesn’t need to be one of them.
What is downtime?
Businesses don’t always realize the ripple effect of downtime, but it can have a significant impact on customers, patients, and your bottom line.
Downtime refers to the inability to access critical business applications like sales processing, CRM, or email. For healthcare practices, it might be patient records or digital imaging. Without access to these tools – or even with slow access – businesses rack up a lot of additional costs while losing time, productivity, and customer (or patient) loyalty!
The right data storage
Establishing the right Storage Area Network (SAN) is a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to keeping your critical systems running quickly, smoothly and securely. Most SMBs already have an established SAN, and chances are, it runs seamlessly in the background – until it doesn’t.
When should you replace your SAN?
Typically a SAN lasts roughly six years, but that timeline could be shorter depending on your business. High growth and larger application systems could have you evaluating a new SAN. When the time comes to replace your SAN, our own in-house HPE Nimble storage expert, Jason Finkelstein, wants you to consider these questions:
Can your current SAN guarantee less than 1-minute downtime?
What if I told you with an HPE Nimble Storage array, you could get 99.9999% guaranteed uptime? But what does 6-Nines mean? Well, with 6-Nines, you are getting a guarantee that the array will not be down more than 2 seconds/month and 31.5 seconds per year.
How can HPE Nimble Storage arrays offer this?
HPE Nimble Storage arrays come with HPE’s Infosight technology. Infosight is an artificial intelligence (AI) cloud-based platform that provides predictive analytics and machine learning. Infosight can predict and resolve 86% of problems before your business is impacted. You can think of Infosight as the first layers of tech support, watching over your systems 24/7. With Infosight analyzing and correlating millions of sensors every second, all customers benefit as their systems get smarter, this ensures their 99.9999% uptime.
Since Infosight is acting as your Tier 1 and Tier 2 support team, any calls you might have to make to the support desk automatically connects you to a Tier 3 support technician.
This direct escalation of support means faster, more focused issue resolution with the peace-of-mind knowing systems will be up and running before morning when everyone starts logging in. With this intuitive, Infosight technology, you’ll often receive a call about an issue before you realize it’s an issue.
Finally, since Infosight is looking at more than just the storage array, it can alert you to other types of issues as well. More than 56% of the problems that Infosight detects and resolves are outside of the array. For example, misconfigurations inside VMware, network issues with ISCSI, or just a server bottleneck issue.
What about upgrades?
With HPE Nimble Storage arrays, all upgrades and expansions can be completed during the day. Improve your productivity by not having to schedule a complete downtime to upgrade firmware, add an expansion shelf, or even install a more powerful controller.
How much is this going to cost me?
The nice thing about HPE Nimble Storage arrays is that all features and licenses are included. The 6-Nines guarantee is a standard benefit on all arrays and is guaranteed as long as the product is supported.
Some of the licenses and features include:
- Deduplication
- Compression
- Encryption
- Always-on App Centric Data Services
Other interesting features for your consideration are:
- Timeless – Controller refresh every three years, with a guarantee 25% performance increase
- dHCI – Hyperconverged Solution
Path Forward: An MSP with a deep bench of experience
For nearly 20 years, Path Forward IT experts have been providing concierge-level 24/7/ 365 IT support to businesses across the US. With that breadth of experience, our dedicated engineers and technicians can quickly hone in on an issue, provide strategic guidance in planning and growing your enterprise, or simply help you select the right hardware to replace end-of-life equipment. Contact us for more information about our HPE Nimble offering and IT Services.
