Managing Growth and Costs, Top Storage Environment Challenges

Avere Systems announced the results of a third-party survey of IT executives. The survey clearly shows rapid increases in data and general growth in business are the major drivers for building higher performance storage networks.

Between July 14 and August 10, 2010, Gatepoint Research invited more than 1,000 select executives to participate in the Next Generation Storage Performance survey, which queried them as to their top storage environment challenges. The top responses were managing storage growth (77 percent) and managing costs (72 percent). In addition, more than two-thirds of responders consider performance scaling decisively important and is accomplished mainly by short-stroking HDDs, adding more HDDs and NAS controller upgrades.

"It’s no surprise that the majority of those surveyed felt that storage growth and the cost of maintaining data are major priorities. Power and space resources continue to rise by throwing more disks at the problem in an attempt to keep up with performance demand, illustrating that traditional disk-based NAS filers have become very inefficient in matching performance and capacity requirements," said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems. "Rather than over-provisioning storage capacity for modest gains in application performance – a choice that requires ever-increasing amounts of power and limited data center space – companies should instead investigate tiered NAS solutions such as the Avere FXT Series, which provides the ability to scale performance with the application and provide a 5:1 reduction in disks, power and rackspace."

Among the survey’s other findings:

• 90 percent of responders have mixed NAS-SAN network storage
• 74 percent manage more than 100 TBs of storage capacity
• Oracle and VMware are the major sources of performance demand
• Over half of respondents consider EMC a strategic storage vendor

Candidates invited to participate in the Next Generation Storage Performance survey were invited via email with each agreeing to participate voluntarily. Seventy-five percent of responders were employed by companies having annual revenues of $1 billion or more; 43 percent with $10 billion or more. Fifty-nine percent of responders work at the director level or above.