It is a given that, as a motivated and busy entrepreneur, you know the need to utilize the appropriate equipment to reach an optimal state of efficiency and growth. Your server exists as the most crucial asset in your technology armory, where the core functionalities of your business lie from your file storage and collaboration to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and all others.

In this blog, I am going to enlighten you on the 9 features of an enterprise server that can elevate your business to the next level. Embracing these key elements of e-commerce inherently changes its operations, optimizing productivity, creating security, guaranteeing performance, and enabling further innovations that facilitate sustained success.

Let’s get started!

1. Scalable, Flexible Storage Can Help You Optimize Your Infrastructure

As your business grows, your needs will grow with it. Enterprise servers that easily scale their capacity up or down on demand allow you to avoid costly overprovisioning while ensuring you’ll have enough space for your future needs.

• Modular scaling involves the addition of disks, shelves, or entire arrays. This allows scaling in small, cost-effective increments to precisely match needs.
• Scale both vertically by scaling performance within existing arrays and horizontally by adding more arrays. This maximizes the utilization of existing resources.
• Mix and match drive types like HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe within the same array. This enables customizing performance and capacity needs within a single system.
• Non-disruptive expansion through hot-swappable components. Expand capacity without service interruption by simply adding new disks.
• Scale both capacity and performance independently as needs change over time. Add disks for more capacity while upgrading controllers for higher performance.
• Support multiple storage protocols like iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, and SMB. Scale protocol access independently by adding target ports.
• Scale data services like cloning, snapshots, and replication in sync with the underlying capacity.
• Scale object, file, and block servers independently based on application requirements.
• Automate tiering of data to primary, secondary, and archive storage tiers as infrastructure scales.
• Leverage the public cloud for additional scalability through hybrid or cloud configurations.
• Integrate on-premises and cloud-based servers.

By selecting a highly scalable and flexible solution, you can right-size your infrastructure perfectly and avoid overprovisioning. This maximizes utilization of existing resources and optimizes costs as your business and space needs grow over time.

2. Provide Self-Servicing Factor for End Users

What is a server for independence and teamwork? Move forward more quickly when users can obtain their own IT needs without IT intervention. Therefore, project leaders tend to achieve their tasks quickly and efficiently.

Faced with the nondescription of facilities, always pick a platform that permits you to self-service layer storage like file shares, block space, and objects through a simple browser-based interface. The users should be paramount while resource control is in their hands, but not beyond the scope of the IT staff. Staff-less space creates conditions for the whole staff to be fully involved, and therefore, this translates to improved productivity.

3. Apply Policy-Based Management

Don´t lose time on typical, engaging data storage management operations. Automate the backups, tiering and performance monitoring of computing systems via a policy-based system. Put policies in place to automatically transfer data to secondary space at night, move unturned data into cheaper tiers, or issue warnings when space limits are reached.

Perhaps the most remarkable benefit is that it frees you from doing routine tasks and allows your team to focus on strategic rather than daily “grind” work. In order to get the most from your available resources, leverage policy-based automated technologies.

4. Boost the Activities by Designing a Smart Grouping

Not all Data is available in the same form in which it enters business processes or is mission-critical. The smart-tiering capability scrutinizes the volume of data and then automatically transfers data or volumes between performance tiers without intervention.

Classify data as active and inactive and therefore store active data on high-performance flash to achieve higher speed and archive inactive data on a lower-cost disk. Attribute to tiers not only performance based on volume but also volume size and random assumptions. The time usage, however, is based on a real-time situation. Serve with the best convenience and maximize space efficiency.

5. Increase Productivity by Reducing Data

Data deduplication eliminates redundant data blocks across your space pools, reducing physical capacity usage and associated costs. Leverage block-level, file-level, or global deduplication that identifies duplicate chunks of data within or across volumes and replaces them with pointers. Consolidate workloads on fewer disks while slashing your footprint by up to 30x. Deduplication is a powerful way to maximize your existing investment.

6. Safeguard Information with Unwavering Dependability

When data loss is not an option, reliability must be bulletproof. Look for redundant controllers, hot-swappable components, automatic failover, and no single point of failure design. Advanced features like triple-parity RAID and erasure coding spread data across disks to survive multiple simultaneous failures without interruption. Select engineered for five nines or better availability so you can rely on access to critical data anytime. Bulletproof reliability is non-negotiable for enterprise server environments.

7. Use Rock-Solid Data Protection to Ensure Business Continuity

Data protection safeguards your business continuity and prevents data loss from disasters, errors, or cyberattacks. Opt for integrated backup, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities rather than bolting on separate point solutions. Configure policies to regularly snapshot data, replicate to remote or cloud targets, and recover within minutes in an emergency.

8. Acquire Knowledge through Utilizable Analytics

Actionable analytics shine a light on your space usage to help optimize costs and performance. Look for reporting, dashboards, and analytics that provide visibility into capacity, performance, data movement patterns, and more. Leverage this intelligence to identify underutilized resources, bottlenecks, security risks, and savings opportunities.

9. Future-Proofing with an SD Architecture

As technologies evolve rapidly, avoid being locked in with proprietary hardware. This future-proofs your investment by allowing non-disruptive upgrades to new hardware platforms and enabling the use of commodity servers. It also gives you flexibility to deploy on-premises or in the cloud. Software-defined space keeps pace with changing business needs.

In Conclusion

By optimizing your enterprise server infrastructure with these powerful features, you gain a competitive edge to accelerate your business. From empowering remote work and scaling agile hybrid cloud environments to automating manual tasks and strengthening security posture, high-performance servers underpin innovation and growth. Make the most of these strategic capabilities to boost efficiency, fuel opportunities, and take your company to new heights.