SolidFire has revealed the results of an independent market research survey that offers insights into how IT professionals are using and benefitting from various storage automation tools and practices. The report, conducted by independent research organisation TechValidate and comprised of over 300 global IT professionals who are not current SolidFire customers, details the drivers behind storage automation, what tools and interfaces IT professionals are using, preferences around storage management plug-ins and software development kits, and benefits realised by implementing storage automation.
? Storage automation is predominantly addressing immediate problems of today, and IT professionals have not yet significantly transitioned to tools that can accommodate next-generation strategies of IT deployment.
? VMware, as the virtualisation/hypervisor market share leader, unsurprisingly has a large contingent of organisations utilising its tools for storage automation.
? VMware vRealize being the most popular (42 per cent), while Microsoft System Centre (16 per cent), OpenStack (15 per cent), and Microsoft Powershell (15 per cent) were fairly evenly split.
? OpenStack, while not showing overwhelming usage currently, is notably being investigated or actively considered by many existing VMware, System Centre and PowerShell users.
? 26 per cent of respondents and 51 per cent of current VMware automation users indicate they are considering implementing OpenStack in the next year.
? Containers, too, are poised to be a disruptive force to traditional, virtualised environments.
? 38 per cent of surveyed IT organisations using OpenStack are currently using or considering Docker.
“The insights gleaned from this report confirm that storage automation is one of the key goals in transitioning to a next generation data centre,” said SolidFire’s VP of Corporate Development & Strategy, Dave Cahill. “While storage infrastructure has long been the least extensible component of the data centre, the flexibility and simplicity of SolidFire’s API and integrations with leading management frameworks, like OpenStack, vSphere and PowerShell, allow organisations to completely automate their data centres and realise the full value of their storage investment without compromise.”
As businesses compete in today’s agile global environment, the increasing demands and velocity of change enacted on data centre and IT professionals are unrelenting. They are expected to routinely manage thousands of business-critical applications, handle massive amounts of data, identify processes for automation so that production time can be reduced, and efficiently respond to daily business demands - all while managing performance and capacity under specific policies. Storage automation enables easy management of every aspect of storage provisioning, management, monitoring and reporting - improving reliability, increasing efficiency and realising the goal of delivering IT as a service.
“As the storage market matures, today’s enterprise-class storage arrays offer many integration points with existing infrastructure and applications,” said IDC’s Storage Research Director, Eric Burgener. “With data continuing to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 44 per cent over the next five years, almost all data centres have increasing automation as a strategic focus.”
