Scaling Infrastructure – Servers/Compute and Storage – Remains Challenge for 34% of SMBs

SMBs struggle with storage complexity, data center complexity, cost, and time investments, according to the 2015 State of SMB IT Infrastructure Survey, conducted by ActualTech Media, LLC.

Nearly 600 technology professionals from organizations with fewer than 500 employees responded to the survey, conducted from March 11th to March 25th by ActualTech Media principals Scott Lowe and David Davis for sponsor Scale Computing, Inc., the mid-market provider of hyperconverged solutions combining storage, servers, virtualization, and management.

Scaling the infrastructure – both servers/compute and storage – remains a challenge for 34% of respondents, and 24% cited infrastructure concerns including managing complexity, troubleshooting, and keeping infrastructure current.

The study showed variety in the degree to which SMBs have rolled out virtualization. There was an even split among respondents, with 50% reporting that half or more of their servers are virtualized, and the other 50% saying less than half are. ActualTech Media credits this to it being widely known that not every workload is easily virtualized, and reluctance to move their mission critical applications to such environments. 50% of respondents also reported that they had dedicated less than 10TB to server virtualization.

vSphere is the most popular hypervisor in place, with 46%, followed by Hyper-V at 25%, and all others combined representing 29%.

“We believe that this data indicates an opportunity for SMB-focused infrastructure and hyperconvergence vendors to serve these customers and to make a significant impact when it comes to improving their operational efficiency,” said Scott Lowe, co-founder, ActualTech Media. “This also presents an opportunity for education of this market, and helping SMB customers better understand that most of their workloads would be well supported with modern hypervisors and related tools.“

“We know SMBs are adopting virtualization to keep their infrastructures up to date, but questions about the current state from which they are evolving, what they are using, what challenges they have, and what they’re spending are too rarely asked of this important and diverse market segment,” said Jeff Ready, CEO, Scale Computing. “We leaped at the chance to work with ActualTech Media on this survey, which offers the most comprehensive information currently available on the needs of small to mid-sized companies.”

To read the complete survey (registration required)

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