State of Storage survey reveals biggest pain points

In the study, two out of three respondents said they work for organisations where more than 50 percent of workloads are virtualised, with 38 percent already using more than one hypervisor. However, respondents also named cost-per-gigabyte as the third most important factor when purchasing a storage system behind performance and ease of use. As companies deploy more virtual machines, a far more accurate predictor of expense is cost-per-VM.

“If IT decision makers continue to apply the same purchasing criteria for physical workloads to virtualised workloads when they select storage, they risk ending up with an infrastructure that’s ill-suited to support modern applications and their business needs,” said Yael Zheng, Chief Marketing Officer at Tintri. “To transform their data centre and eliminate pain points, they need to turn to storage that’s designed for virtualised applications and cloud.”

The study compared pain points of respondents using traditional storage technologies vs. next generation storage technologies and found that those using traditional systems are feeling more pain in every category:

· Performance (latency): 53 percent of respondents using conventional storage reported performance pain vs. just 30 percent of those using next generation storage
· Capital Expenses (reduce spend): 44 percent of respondents using conventional storage reported capex pain vs. 36 percent of those using next generation storage
· Manageability (admin time and effort): 39 percent of respondents using conventional storage reported pain vs. 21 percent of those using next generation storage

The 2015 State of Storage study indicates that sticking with incumbent storage is actually riskier than adopting new technology. Companies are starting to catch on, which explains why two-thirds of respondents had introduced a new storage vendor in the last 24 months.