Survey: Performance Issues Are Top 'Pain Point' for Storage -- Virtualization Review

Survey: Performance Issues Are Top 'Pain Point' for Storage

The study also found that two out three organizations have more than 50 percent of workloads virtualized.

By Keith Ward
06/02/2015

The No. 1 pain point when it comes to storage today is performance, with latency a big issue, according to a new survey.

The study, by storage vendor Tintri, includes some typical vendor bias, but also sheds light on trends in the industry. Performance was the biggest complaint among the "1,020 data center professionals," with 50 percent citing it. Heavy capital expense was the next biggest pain point, with 41 percent, followed closely by an inability to scale well (40 percent), manageability issues (39 percent). Just 21 percent listed moving to cloud computing as a major problem.

Legacy Still Rules
Also clear from the study is that legacy storage providers like IBM, HP, Dell and EMC continue to rule the roost. A full 74 percent have nothing but systems from these legacy vendors in their datacenters, while 6 percent have storage from "emerging storage providers" (Tintri was listed as an example, along with vendors suppliers like Nutanix, Pure and Solidfire). Twenty percent of shops have a mix of legacy and emerging storage vendors in place.

Virtualization, which has upended the storage industry, was closely examined as well. The survey, referencing a Gartner Inc. study, noted that the percentage of virtualized workloads has skyrocketed from 2 percent to 75 percent in the past decade. "Indeed, 2 out of 3 respondents to our study said they work for organizations where more than 50% of workloads are virtualized," the Tintri reported stated.

Multi-Hypervisor
In addition, more companies are going the multi-hypervisor route, with 38 percent using more than one hypervisor. VMware's vSphere was in 76 percent of datacenters; Microsoft Hyper-V in 31 percent; Citrix XenServer in 17 percent; Red Hat KVM in 10 percent; and Open source KVM at 9 percent.

All these numbers lead to the fact that organizational spending on IT is seeing a shift. Over the next three years, spending on storage and private cloud is expected to rise a lot (26 percent and 27 percent of shops, respectively), while fewer businesses will spend significant amounts on server and compute resources. Spending on public cloud should fit in to the middle, with 21 percent expected to open the vault, and 35 percent spending much less on it.

Where the Cuts Are Coming
In what might be expected given today's cloud-crazed environment, few companies anticipate drops in spending on cloud over the three-year span. Just 8 percent plan to cut spending on public and private clouds, while server/compute, network and storage are expected to see decreased spending from anywhere between 17 percent and 26 percent of companies.

One thing has remained the same, according to the survey: the criteria companies use to choose storage providers. The four things they look for: