Study Provides Insights Into Software-Defined Storage

One key finding: only 6 percent of those polled aren't considering a move to SDS.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 05/31/2017

DataCore Software just published the results of its sixth annual "State of Software-Defined Storage, Hyperconverged and Cloud Storage" survey. The survey was designed to assess the impact of "software-driven" storage deployments within organizations across the globe.

The survey asked respondents about levels of spending on technologies including software-defined storage (SDS), flash technology, hyperconverged storage, private cloud storage and OpenStack, with software-defined storage topping the charts in 2017 spending.

Major Business Drivers of SDS
The respondents indicated that major business drivers for implementing SDS include:

• To simplify management of different models of storage – 55 percent
• To future-proof infrastructure – 53 percent
• To avoid hardware lock-in from storage manufacturers – 52 percent
• To extend the life of existing storage assets – 47 percent

Only 6 percent of those surveyed said they were not considering a move to SDS.

Although surveys of this type often do not ask about project failures and disappointment, the respondents were asked "What technology disappointments or false starts have you encountered in your storage infrastructure?" The top three answers:

• Cloud storage failed to reduce costs – 31 percent
• Managing object storage is difficult – 29 percent
• Flash failed to accelerate applications – 16 percent

Dan's Take: Software Defined Storage Is Increasingly Important
Although I usually don't comment on surveys done by other research firms, this one appears to offer solid information and the analysis provides useful insight. The findings of the survey are consistent with the results of smaller-scale work done by my company and are worth knowing about. I found what enterprises are seeking through the use of this technology to be rather interesting. Here's what the report had to say:

The majority of respondents (83 percent) replied that business continuity from high availability was the top concern (metro clustering, synchronous mirroring), while more than two thirds (73 percent) replied that enabling storage capacity expansion without disruption was a primary capability of importance. Cost efficiency and disaster recovery (asynchronous replication to remote site) also ranked high, coming in at 65 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

I also found the section concerning the adoption of "servers as the new storage" were quite telling.

About the Survey
The survey was conducted in late 2016 through April 2017, and gathered information concerning both the expectations and the experiences of 426 IT professionals who are currently using or evaluating SDS, hyperconverged and cloud storage to solve critical data storage challenges.

Respondents were from a mix of organizations, including those with fewer than 500 employees, between 500 and 5,000 employees, and more than 5,000 employees.

The majority of respondents represented enterprises receiving $1 billion in revenues or less. North America and Europe both represented 42 percent of the respondents. The respondents represented a mix of industries including financial services (11 percent), healthcare (13 percent), government (11 percent), manufacturing (13 percent), education (8 percent), IT services (20 percent), and "other" (23 percent).