Storage Management Key Issue for Virtualised Environments in UK

With 94%  of companies in Europe having virtualised at least some of their IT infrastructure, Tintri, Inc. announced results from a survey that illustrates the storage challenges data centre administrators are facing with their virtualised environments. 

The results of the survey show that although UK organisations are embracing virtualisation, many are spending too much time managing these environments. In fact, although virtualisation is designed with efficiency in mind, two in five (40%) of businesses surveyed admitted to spending 30mn every day managing their virtualised estate. This amounts to nearly one month per year (26 days per year, which is equivalent to 3.7 weeks per year).

Doug Rich, EMEA VP, Tintri, said: “Businesses today are embracing virtualisation as a means to streamline operations and achieve efficiency across the IT estate. However, their storage is struggling to keep pace with the new environment, slowing performance and creating a host of management difficulties.

“Businesses rely on VMs to run critical databases, enterprise applications and private clouds, as well as host thousands of desktop computers and mobile devices. When any of these processes fail to perform well, the IT team gets bogged down with maintenance. This reaffirms the importance of having visibility and control over virtual environments to locate and fix problems quickly.”

Unfortunately, troubleshooting is a clear point today. The survey showed that half (51%) of businesses spend hours, days and weeks getting performance back to normal after pinpointing a problem. With only a tenth (9%) of virtualised infrastructures (including virtualised desktop and servers) fully meeting the performance needs of users, and with organisations looking to virtualise more of their IT, businesses expect higher capabilities from their virtual systems.

Rich concluded: “If businesses are spending this much time trying to get virtualisation to work for them, they might begin to question just how efficient the technology is. The need for efficiency is now driving the industry toward smart storage architectures that have the intelligence to understand what’s happening at the VM level. Tintri is specifically designed with this in mind and therefore helps organisations to manage their environments effectively.“

The survey was conducted by EasyInsites on behalf of Tintri. It comprised 307 respondents from commercial organisations with 200 plus employees in Europe (including 103 respondents in the UK). All respondents were IT decision makers.