Survey Reveals 26 Percent of Institutions Look to Software-Defined Storage to Simplify Storage Management, Improve Business Continuity and Protect Current and Future Investments; Nearly 40% Not Planning to Use Flash or Solid State Disks for Server Virtualization Projects Due to Cost Concerns
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – April 17, 2014 – For the fourth consecutive year, DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, conducted a survey of 388 global IT professionals to identify current storage challenges that organizations are facing and what forces are driving demand for software-defined storage (SDS). This year’s State of Software-Defined Storage report shows that these institutions look for software-defined storage (SDS) to simplify management (26 percent) of their ‘isolated islands’ of storage devices and enable them to reduce disruptions (30 percent), better protect investments (32 percent) and future proof their infrastructure (21 percent) to absorb new technologies like Flash. The move to SDS is very appealing considering that almost half of respondents identified the difficulty of migrating between different models and generations of storage devices as preventing them from using other manufacturers or models of storage devices that could well reduce their costs.
Highlights of Survey Include:
- The two main factors that impede organizations from considering different models and manufacturers of storage devices were the plethora of tools required to manage them (41 percent) and the difficulty of migrating between different models and generations (37 percent).
- Interestingly, 39 percent of respondents don’t run into these concerns as independent storage virtualization software allows their organizations to pool different devices and models from competing manufacturers and manage them centrally.
- More than half of the respondents (63 percent) said that they currently have less than 10% of capacity assigned to flash storage.
- Nearly 40% of respondents said that they were not planning to use flash or solid state disks for server virtualization projects due to cost concerns.
- When asked how serious an obstacle performance degradation or the inability to meet performance expectations was when virtualizing server workloads, 23 percent of respondents ranked it as the most serious obstacle, and 32 percent viewed it as somewhat of an obstacle to virtualization.
- Similar to last year, both the ability to enable storage capacity expansion without disruption (30 percent) and the improvement of disaster recovery and business continuity practices (32 percent) ranked highest for reasons that organizations deployed storage virtualization software.
Software Defined Storage is needed to stop the proliferation of ‘Separate Storage Islands’
“The results of this survey confirm one of the biggest and most frustrating IT problems organizations are currently facing is the difficult and daunting task of managing diversity and migrating between different vendors, models and generations of storage devices – which prevent them from entertaining more attractive alternatives from competing suppliers,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO at DataCore. “Software-defined storage is not only designed to help organizations pool all of their available storage assets, but it allows organizations the ability to manage end-to-end and to add any type of storage asset to their existing storage architecture – helping raise productivity and keeping costs to a minimum.”
“One of the more interesting findings in DataCore’s software-defined storage survey, was that 63 percent of respondents said that they have less than 10 percent of capacity assigned to flash storage,” said Randy Kerns, senior analyst at Evaluator Group. “With all of the hype around the ‘all-flash data center,’ it is clear that new fast hardware technology alone is not the answer; there are multiple critical factors preventing organizations from making this move – lack of smart software that integrates and optimizes their use, the relative high cost and the realizations that not all applications benefit from flash devices.”
The broad makeup of respondents to DataCore’s State of Software-Defined Storage survey provides insights across a statistically significant cross-section of modern IT organizations from different sized institutions and a wide range of vertical segments. IT professionals from organizations across the globe participated in the survey, with 57 percent of respondents from organizations with less than 1,000 employees, 23 percent of respondents from organizations with 1,000 to 5,000 employees, and 20 percent of respondents from organizations with more than 5,000 employees. Respondents represented a range of industries, including Financial Services (13 percent), Healthcare (12 percent), Government (9 percent), Manufacturing (16 percent), Education (12 percent), IT services (16 percent) and Other (22 percent).
DataCore’s 2014 State of Virtualization Survey was conducted in March 2014. To view the entire report, please visit: https://www.datacore.com/sf-docs/default-source/whitepapers/english/the-state-of-software-defined-storage-2014.pdf.
About DataCore
DataCore is a leader in software-defined storage. The company’s storage virtualization software empowers organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore’s adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture. Visit https://www.datacore.com or call (877) 780-5111 for more information.
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