Cloud Scalability
What is Cloud Scalability?
Cloud scalability is a flexible, reliable data infrastructure capable of scaling up or down in its amount of data, number of applications, and types of locations to support changing business demands and objectives.
Why is cloud scalable?
Cloud scalability overcomes many of the limitations of legacy data storage by providing a unifying data infrastructure with several important advantages:
· Scale-efficient: Resources are allocated and reallocated quickly and easily in response to changing demands.
· Self-healing: Automatic data replication stores redundant mirrored copies of all data across different machines and locations, so even if a disc fails, applications continue running.
· Load-balancing: Automatic load-balancing distributes workloads throughout the system, improving the overall reliability and availability of resources.
· Open access: Multiple specialized tools with different APIs can access the same data at the same time.
· Versatility: Data can be stored as files, objects, event streams, tables, and more—all within the same system.
What are the benefits of cloud scalability?
A scale-efficient system—one with true scalability—scales both up and down in terms of the number and variety of data, applications, machines, and locations involved. True cloud scalability is:
· Flexible: Performs a variety of functions using different tools and applications, all on the same system.
· Changeable: Adapts to shifting demands and requirements without having to rearchitect, whether that means expanding capability or pulling back down.
· Reliable: Continues working uninterrupted through hardware failures or spikes in traffic.
· Efficient: Allows one IT team to support multiple projects and systems with the same underlying data structure.
· Simple: Streamlines workloads and architecture for higher performance and a cost-effective, future-proof system.
When should you use cloud scalability?
Large-scale systems invite complications, and large organizations have a clear tendency to spawn multiple independent systems designed for different purposes in different places. People naturally focus on the problems in front of them, which is how multiple problems evolve multiple, unconnected solutions. Enterprise systems grow unnecessarily complex and cumbersome, with siloed data and wasted resources.
As your organization expands to include multiple systems in multiple locations, and as it begins to generate greater volumes and varieties of data, it pays to step back and evaluate your IT infrastructure to ensure that you have a system that’s effective and cost-efficient for your current needs, but also capable of adapting to changes.
The next change might mean scaling up in size, but it could also mean introducing new business processes or new technologies like machine learning or AI. A scale-efficient system can adapt to these changes seamlessly, without downtime and without having to fundamentally rearchitect.
How do you achieve cloud scalability?
Data is the common thread running through every enterprise process. It’s the unifying, organizing principle that ties everything together. Making a common, uniform data layer the backbone of a scalable system integrates and simplifies operations from edge to cloud.
Building a system with true scalability—one that’s not just able to hold more data, but able to support a wide variety of different data types, applications, locations, hardware, and users—begins with a comprehensive data strategy that goes beyond individual projects to reach across your organization. Eliminating data silos makes your data available for use by multiple groups, and ensuring that data can be re-used helps eliminate data waste.
The next step is to adopt a unifying data infrastructure that’s not only efficient for your immediate needs, but flexible to allow you to grow and adapt to changes, whether it’s adding new products, expanding to new locations, upgrading or replacing hardware, or introducing new tools and processes. A unified data architecture like HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric provides a common data layer across multiple applications and across your organization.
HPE and cloud scalability
The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform represents one of the industry’s most comprehensive on-premises offerings for secure, scalable cloud services. HPE GreenLake empowers businesses to transform and modernize their workloads for cloud operation, optimize and protect applications from edge to cloud, and provide ready access to all forms of data, regardless of its origin or location.
HPE GreenLake Lighthouse makes multiple cloud services available on demand, without configuration complexity. Its secure, cloud-native infrastructure eliminates the need to order and wait for new configurations. Optimized cloud services can be up and running from any location in minutes.
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric is a highly scalable, entirely software-defined solution that provides data storage, data management, and data motion—whether at the edge, on-premises, or in the cloud. It’s hardware-agnostic, allowing tremendous flexibility in terms of what systems can make use of it; And it stores data in different forms—as files, objects, event streams, and tables—all part of the same system, under the same management and security. That unifying advantage endows the system with true scalability.