31% Cited Performance as Top Consideration to Purchase Networked Storage

Panasas, Inc., in high-performance scale-out NAS storage solutions, announced the results of a survey conducted in April, 2010 targeting business leaders, researchers, and IT professionals working in energy, government, finance, manufacturing, bioscience, higher education and other industries. 

The objective of the survey was to better understand the requirements of managing business data and the benefits associated with networked storage environments. Of the 147 respondents, 31 percent cited performance as the top consideration when making a networked storage purchasing decision. Furthermore, 62 percent of respondents believed that either NAS or scale-out NAS technology would best allow them to support company business goals. The survey revealed that respondents selected NAS more than three times as often as any other storage technology choice, including iSCSI and SAN (both selected by 19 percent of respondents).   

“Customers clearly recognize the performance demands on their storage environments and how that impacts innovation, productivity and ultimately the bottom line,” said Bob Schoettle, chief marketing officer at Panasas. “This survey demonstrates that today, more than ever, businesses are faced with explosive data growth, and storage systems need to scale infinitely with strong and consistent performance.”

Additional Findings from the Panasas Survey:
The overwhelming majority (76 percent) of survey respondents expect their storage performance to increase over the next 12 months. They also indicated that performance and scale are critical in their networked storage environments.

Specifically:

• The single biggest concern related to data storage demands was the ability to scale at the rate of data growth (44 percent)
• Increased performance of systems was cited as the single most important benefit of scale-out NAS according to 33 percent of respondents
• 25 percent of respondents cited infinite scalability as the most important benefit of scale-out NAS, and18 percent of overall respondents believed that having a scalable file system was the single most important benefit of scale-out NAS