DataCore recently released the findings of its latest survey, which point to some disappointment in the technologies that are purported to enable next-generation storage workloads and make life a little easier for overworked IT administrators.
After quizzing 426 IT professionals, the software-defined storage (SDS) vendor found that nearly a third (31 percent) suffered false starts or were generally disappointed by how cloud storage failed to yield cost savings. Twenty-nine percent of respondents found object storage difficult to manage.
For some, flash didn’t to live up to its performance-boosting reputation. Sixteen percent said their SSD-packed arrays and other flash-filled storage systems fell short of accelerating their applications.
Somewhat to be expected, IT pros are typically encountering storage performance issues with databases and enterprise applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
DataCore’s study also revealed that spending on software-defined storage is on the rise.
Sixteen percent of respondents said that they were allocating 11 percent to 25 percent of their budgets on software-defined storage. Thirteen percent said they were devoting more than a quarter of budgets to the technology.
Top drivers for software-defined storage include storage management simplification (55 percent) and infrastructure future-proofing. Many organizations are looking to avoid vendor lock-in in terms of hardware (52 percent) while nearly half (47 percent) of all respondents are seeking to eke out some more useful life out of their existing storage. Very few organizations (six percent) are sticking with their traditional, non-SDS storage infrastructures.
In the meantime, hyperconverged storage adoption is lower than anticipated, DataCore discovered.
A third (33 percent) of respondents said they weren’t considering hyperconverged implementations that feature integrated compute, networking and storage. Thirty-four percent said they were strongly considering technology but hadn’t deployed it.
Twenty percent of those surveyed said they were running a few nodes of hyperconverged storage while only seven percent reported a major deployment. A mere six percent had standardized on hyperconverged IT systems in their data centers, according to the study.
“The data from our sixth annual survey of IT professionals shows that investment in software-defined storage continues its upward trend. It’s also interesting to learn about adoption plans versus actual implementation of newer technologies, such as hyperconverged infrastructure,” Carrie Reber, vice president of worldwide marketing at DataCore, in a blog post. “This year’s survey data also aligns with the evolving industry view that hyperconverged is not necessarily synonymous with a physical appliance.”
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.