Virtualized Storage Bottlenecks Being Top Storage Concern in Europe

As VMworld Europe, an independent data centre solutions survey commissioned by Avere Systems, Inc., provider of NAS optimisation, shows that the storage bottleneck in virtualized systems is starting to concern more than half of European enterprises.
 
According to the Avere Systems’ European NAS Audit 2012, as data storage systems grow, the load placed on standard networked systems is heading for overload and the subsequent slow-down impinges on business efficiency.

According to the survey, 77% of organisations asked said they had applications that required high performance from storage networks.
 
Pure NAS is in use by 27% of businesses responding to the questionnaire and a further 49% have NAS running in tandem with SAN.

An indication of the size of the problem is that 51% of the respondents access over 50TB of data and just under half of these have amassed over 500TB.

Economies offered by virtualisation have been a boon to many organisations and only 16% of the sample said they had no plans in this area. The concentration of numerous applications on a single server saves on hardware costs but the downside is the resulting contention for storage resources.
 
When asked which measures were being considered to meet the data access challenge, the top five solutions were:

• updating the NAS controllers (28%),
• buying more HDDs (26%),
• adding SSD arrays (26%),
• switching to FC networks (23%), and
• 21% considering NAS optimisation technologies.

"Many organisations in Europe are opting to add bigger NAS controllers and buy shelves of disk to solve their virtualisation challenges because that is what storage vendors have been selling them for the past two decades. Unfortunately, these types of solutions are based on aging product architectures designed for an earlier era and have translated into costly piles of gear for customers that now consume vast amounts of data centre space:" commented Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing, Avere Systems. "A better, more efficient approach is to deploy an optimised edge-core storage architecture designed for modern applications such as virtualisation and big data that keeps active data closest to the users on edge filers filled with fast storage media. The less active data is kept on dense storage media on core filers that takes up a fraction of the space and energy of older devices."

About Avere Systems NAS Audit
The Avere Systems NAS Audit was conducted online during August and early September 2012. 114 storage professionals from across EMEA completed the survey. These storage professionals worked across a variety of sectors including: finance, telecom, aerospace, legal, retail, engineering, technology, publishing, and education.