IT Professionals More Pained by Storage Manageability Than Performance

IT administrators and leaders are now more pained by manageability than performance when it comes to storage.

That’s the finding of a new survey of 300 data centre professionals, conducted by Tintri, Inc., producer of VM-aware storage (VAS) for virtualisation and cloud environments.

Tintri released the results of its annual State of Storage for virtualised enterprises study. The final report is a compilation of feedback from global IT professionals on pains, priorities, opinions and concerns around the storage industry.

Unlike Tintri’s 2015 State of Storage survey, when performance and latency topped the list of storage pain points, this year 49% of respondents identified their biggest concern as manageability-a jump of 10 percentage points. At the same time, more than one third of respondents said they still rely on antiquated spreadsheets to manage and map their VMs.

What are the biggest storage pain points you have today?

Respondents noted that their virtual footprint continues to grow, with one in three indicating that 90% of their applications are virtualised, and four in five were at least 50% virtualised. One-half of the survey-takers oversee at least 500 VMs and more than one-quarter manage 1,000 or more VMs.

“The storage landscape and its challenges continue to evolve,” said Yael Zheng, CMO, Tintri. “While performance remains a top challenge, IT professionals are increasingly concerned about the challenge of managing a complex virtualised infrastructure. Especially at scale-as virtualised and cloud environments expand to tens of thousands of VMs, the burden on IT to manage storage with reduced staffing, predict future growth and maintain uptime will stretch resources to a breaking point.“

The survey also examined the manageability challenges that come with a growing virtual footprint. 

According to responses, here’s how these challenges are being met:

• After manageability, the top storage pain points were performance (46%), scale (42%), and capital expenses (41%)
• 68% of respondents indicated that they are evaluating new technologies, with 48% evaluating new storage vendors
• Of those evaluating new storage vendors, 52% are evaluating VM-aware storage, and 44% are looking at all-flash storage options
• Consideration of legacy storage providers for future use has declined by 8% on average
• Most respondents (69%) indicated that they are exploring new technologies to address their current challenges.
• The most frequently cited evaluation criteria prioritise performance, integration with existing infrastructure, ability to scale, and cost per gigabyte.

Full report (registration required)