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Simplyblock for FinOps

Why FinOps Should Care About Simplyblock

FinOps professionals are constantly seeking innovative solutions to optimize costs and enhance operational efficiency. Enter simplyblock, an intelligent storage optimizer that’s revolutionizing how organizations manage their cloud storage resources. By orchestrating and unifying access to various storage technologies like Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Local Instance Storage, simplyblock offers a comprehensive solution that addresses many of the pain points FinOps teams face daily.

Key Benefits for FinOps

  1. Cost Reduction: Through intelligent storage pooling and thin provisioning, simplyblock can significantly reduce overall storage costs.
  2. Improved Resource Utilization: By consolidating partially used storage volumes, simplyblock maximizes resource efficiency.
  3. Simplified Management: The unified access to different storage technologies streamlines storage management processes.
  4. Enhanced Performance: With features like NVMe over TCP and local instance storage caching, simplyblock can boost storage performance without increasing costs.
  5. Flexible Scaling: Thin provisioning allows for easy scaling of storage resources without overprovisioning.
  6. Improved Security: Per-volume encryption and tenant isolation enhance data security without compromising on cost-efficiency.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Thin Provisioning: A FinOps Dream

One of simplyblock’s standout features for FinOps is its thin provisioning capability. This technology allows you to create virtual disks of any size without pre-allocating the entire storage capacity upfront. In practice, this means you only pay for the storage you actually use, not what you think you might need in the future.

For example, if you provision a 1TB volume but only use 100GB, you’re only billed for the 100GB. This approach can lead to substantial cost savings, especially in environments with unpredictable storage growth patterns.

Storage Tiering: Balancing Performance and Cost

Simplyblock’s automatic storage tiering feature is another powerful tool in the FinOps arsenal. By intelligently moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage tiers like Amazon S3, organizations can optimize their storage costs without sacrificing performance for hot data.

This tiering happens transparently to the application, meaning there’s no need for costly application rewrites or complex data management schemes. FinOps teams can leverage this feature to implement cost-effective data lifecycle management strategies automatically.

EBS Volume Pooling: Maximizing Resource Efficiency

In many cloud environments, EBS volumes are often underutilized, leading to wasted resources and inflated costs. Simplyblock addresses this issue by pooling multiple EBS volumes into a shared storage resource. This pooling allows for better utilization of available storage and can reduce the number of EBS volumes needed, directly impacting the bottom line.

Moreover, simplyblock’s ability to acquire additional EBS volumes as needed means you can start small and scale up efficiently, aligning perfectly with FinOps principles of matching resource allocation to actual demand.

Practical Use Cases for FinOps

Optimizing Database Storage Costs

For organizations running multiple databases or offering database-as-a-service solutions, simplyblock can be a game-changer. Its ability to provide thin-provisioned, high-performance storage with automatic tiering can significantly reduce the storage footprint and costs associated with database operations.

Furthermore, the database branching feature enabled by simplyblock’s copy-on-write technology allows for efficient creation of development and testing environments without duplicating entire datasets, leading to substantial cost savings in the development lifecycle.

Enhancing Observability Platform Efficiency

Companies offering observability solutions, like Datadog or New Relic, deal with massive amounts of data that have varying access patterns. Simplyblock’s tiering and local instance storage caching can help these platforms optimize their storage strategy, keeping hot data readily accessible while moving colder data to more cost-effective tiers.

Streamlining Multi-Tenant Environments

For SaaS providers managing multi-tenant environments, simplyblock’s tenant isolation feature combined with its efficient storage pooling can lead to better resource utilization across the entire customer base. This approach allows FinOps teams to implement more granular and cost-effective pricing models based on actual storage usage per tenant.

Implementing Simplyblock in Your Organization

Adopting simplyblock in your cloud infrastructure requires careful planning and execution. Here are some steps FinOps teams should consider:

  1. Assessment: Evaluate your current storage usage patterns and costs across different cloud storage services.
  2. Pilot Implementation: Start with a small-scale deployment, perhaps focusing on a specific workload or department.
  3. Performance and Cost Monitoring: Carefully track the performance impacts and cost savings achieved through the pilot.
  4. Optimization: Use the insights gained to fine-tune simplyblock’s configuration for your specific use cases.
  5. Scaled Rollout: Based on the success of the pilot, plan a phased rollout across your organization.
  6. Continuous Evaluation: Regularly review the performance and cost metrics to ensure ongoing optimization.

By leveraging simplyblock’s capabilities, FinOps teams can drive significant improvements in storage cost efficiency, performance, and management simplicity. As cloud storage continues to be a major component of overall cloud spend, tools like simplyblock that offer intelligent optimization become invaluable assets in the FinOps toolkit.