As part of NGX Storage’s “This Quarter’s Voice” interview series, we spoke with Sławomir Karpiński, CEO of Connect Distribution, about how organisations can keep digital transformation moving as storage costs rise. Drawing on more than 20 years in the sales channel, he shares a Polish market perspective on changing infrastructure needs, the role of hybrid storage and making better use of existing resources.
Q1: From your perspective as a distributor working with Polish enterprises and system integrators, what are the biggest infrastructure challenges organisations face as they pursue digital transformation today?
S.K.: For a long time, digital transformation in Poland was understood mainly as migrating from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. It soon became clear that the cloud is not the answer to everything, and some workloads are simply not suited to it. This was an important lesson for our partners and their customers: a hybrid approach is not a compromise but a necessity. Today, hybrid architecture, tailored to what customers actually need, is the dominant model.
The new challenge is uncertainty: limited hardware availability, component shortages, sharply rising prices and unpredictable deliveries. This affects the whole channel just as much as end customers.
Q2: How are changes in flash storage and DRAM prices, along with supply lead times, affecting customers’ purchasing decisions?
S.K.: I have to admit that the current situation with drives and memory has surprised me. In more than 20 years in the sales channel, I have not seen anything like it. Even COVID was not this dramatic.
At first, when nobody knew what we were facing, customers pushed partners to absorb extra costs or pay penalties for late deliveries. That quickly proved to be the wrong approach. Today, customers work together with partners to redefine their needs, optimise their infrastructure and sometimes redesign their architecture to make the best use of available resources. Some applications move to the cloud and others stay on-premises, often with workloads managed dynamically across the available resources.
Q3: In your experience, what can organisations do to keep infrastructure projects moving when storage prices change faster than their budgets can be approved?
S.K.: The key is making informed purchases based on a thorough analysis of applications, data types and existing resources, and planning well in advance rather than from day to day. This covers future capacity and workload needs, but the biggest gains often come from rethinking the architecture as a whole, so that every component purchased is used to its full potential.
Q4: How can organisations assess which workloads genuinely require all-flash performance and where a hybrid storage approach could meet their needs at a more manageable cost?
S.K.: This requires tools that analyse the actual load of each application over time. They should capture seasonality, such as month-end or quarter-end processing, record peak loads and map existing storage systems by the protocols they use.
Only then can architects and management make an informed decision. It often turns out that another all-flash array is not needed. An intelligent hybrid array can cover capacity needs and free up all-flash space for the most demanding workloads.
Q5: What opportunities do you see for organisations to consolidate different workloads on a unified storage platform instead of purchasing separate systems?
S.K.: Many organisations still buy a separate system for each need, such as databases, file shares, backup or archiving. Each one comes with its own management, support contract, rack space and power consumption, and it is common for one system to have unused capacity while another runs out.
Unified storage serves block, file and S3 object workloads from a single system, combining flash for performance with HDD for cost-effective capacity. Workloads with very different requirements can run on one platform, with the system itself directing I/O to the most suitable media. The result is fewer systems to buy and maintain, simpler administration and better use of capacity. At a time of high prices and unpredictable deliveries, this flexibility matters even more, and it is one of the main reasons we decided to partner with NGX Storage.