DATA ANALYTICS: the passport to competitive differentiation – Maximum storage performance is the minimum requirement

The technology that data has been waiting for
Consumers are becoming more discerning, demanding, and digitally-savvy in how they choose not just their holidays, but also the providers they opt to purchase holidays and related products from.

Providers need to be equally discerning and demanding in their technology choices; making the right moves from an infrastructure perspective to keep pace with the competition, if not leaps and bounds ahead of it.

In the age of Big Data, the speed and insight with which you cultivate and accelerate consumer decision making in your favour is about far more than simply gathering the right data; the essential strategy is based on the two critical aspects of knowing how to manage and use the data, and knowing what technology will enable you to do both – with the greatest precision and to maximum effect.

The technology that travel providers choose is essential in enabling maximum performance for their business models and the best buying experience for consumers. Data storage selection is a sensitive issue. It can be make or break time for your data, your customer-centricity, and your business success.

Delivering winning customer-centricity

Your customers expect to make decisions in an informed way, with all the options at their fingertips, often through their mobile phones. They also expect clear choices to be set out before them, intelligently; optional end-to-end extensions to the travel package delivered by providers who demonstrate their fully-rounded capabilities and earn respect through how smart their systems are. These expectations put a focus on:

• targeted advertising and promotions
• innovative and context aware pricing policies
• location-based advantages.

The Travel and Tourism sector is in the vanguard of digital disruption supporting capabilities in these three areas, with an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the importance of customer-centricity. The context for digital transformation within the industry is the incredibly highly attuned level of intense competition; customers have a lot of choice, limitless quality/price options and a world which is, simply put, their oyster.

Solid State Storage for Distinctly Decisive Data

A formidable platform of storage arrays is required to deal with the complexities of

advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence which drive better insights enabling an organisation to pro-act in the light of changing market conditions and real-time consumer behaviours. Such a platform comes from Tegile, a Western Digital brand and Viadex partner.

In 2017 Gartner named Tegile a Visionary in its Magic Quadrant, with the lowest sized array option at 6TB and the largest at over 1.2Pb in size – all using the same operating system, available features, and GUI used for manageability. Tegile’s price for performance is one of the best in the Solid-State Array (SSA) market,

Here is the platform
The underlying file system is based on ZFS, an open, standards-based system, combined with Tegile’s own operating system, IntelliOS, that has been built for flash optimised software architecture. Tegile arrays have active/active controllers which deliver higher performance than other similar solutions. Although they can also be active/passive like Nimble, organisations running different applications on the same array consider the active/active configuration is a must-have.

The solution offers compression, thin provisioning, space efficient snaps and clones, and de-duplication. The de-duplication technology is in-line and can be enabled or disabled on a per LUN or per share basis.  You can therefore leverage massive reductions in data usage across all types of environments, from file-based through to virtualised.

Tegile has announced more additions to its arrays coming in 2018 on the back of the acquisition from Western Digital. These include NVMe over fabrics, and storage class memory options.  For more on NVMe-of see the recent Viadex blog.

An invitation: Ready to unleash the power of your data? Come and see the Viadex team at stand TT104 at Travel Technology Europe (TTE), 21-22 February at Olympia in London to find our more about storage solutions to drive smarter data analytics and win over more consumers, more often. If you can’t make the show, just email us at marketing@viadex.com