Flow management

The primary function of a storage infrastructure is to provide predictable access to data for business applications during normal IT operations. The characteristics of this data access are typically expressed in service levels; notably performance and availability.

Service level requirements differ from application to application, the type of data, and the phase in the lifecycle of the data. A major IT objective is to optimise the storage infrastructure to meet varying service levels at the lowest possible cost.

Meeting service levels depends on many factors; the performance may be expressed in throughput, response time or I/Os per second; the data access may be randomly or sequentially oriented. Specific applications such as transactional databases, business intelligence applications and video streaming each have specific profiles that have a major impact on the storage devices that serve them.

This understanding of the way that data flows between the business applications and the storage devices is what Bull call Flow Management, and fundamental to building infrastructures that meet service levels at the lowest economic cost.

The breadth and depth of our storage expertise, and extensive partnerships with storage industry leaders allow us to provide independent advise our customers on the storage technologies that are right for their business, and to build innovative, cost-effective storage solutions