Hybrid Prevailing Over All-Flash Arrays

Hybrid-flash is prevailing over all-flash as virtualization hits critical tipping point in the enterprise, according to the 2016 State of Storage in Virtualization report released by ActualTech Media, LLC and Tegile Systems, Inc., provider of flash storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments.

This and other findings from the survey suggest that as virtualization further penetrates the data center, companies are reexamining their storage systems and practices, sparking a renaissance in the storage landscape.

“Virtualization as a trend has been growing steadily for some time now, but available tools have now achieved the credibility to convince IT to move even the largest or most important work loads to a virtual environment,” said Scott D. Lowe, partner and co-founder, ActualTech Media. “In this survey, we found that virtualization and storage are at a fascinating intersection right now, leading to bigger and faster virtualization and an exciting evolution of the storage market.“

Findings from the survey include:

A rising number of enterprises of all sizes are turning to VMs
to power more and larger workloads,
even across their most mission-critical systems.

• Over 60% of respondents operate with a majority of their environment virtualized, with 97% have at least some workloads virtualized. 
• Of those, 66% have virtualized SQL Server.
• Among applications that generate large workloads, file sharing, Exchange, and SharePoint are virtualized by 53%, 49%, and 45% respectively.

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Flash hybrid systems have emerged and established themselves
as the undisputed standard among modern, virtualized enterprises.   

• 61% of respondents indicate they currently use a hybrid storage array within their data center.
• 23% of respondents use some kind of all-flash array, while only 3% run their entire storage environment using all-flash.
• Over 70% of respondents cite improving existing application response times as a key driver for deploying flash storage

Companies continue to struggle with storage systems that do not deliver
the performance, capacity, and the functionality they need,
signaling an urgent demand for fast, flexible storage solutions.

• 53% of respondents indicate that they experience storage performance issues, and 58% indicate some level of capacity issues.
• 56% of respondents report using multiple storage protocols, with 30% using three or more protocols.
• Block-level protocols are most popular for virtualized environments, with 48% of respondents indicating they use FC and 42% indicating they use iSCSI. 36% report using the file-level protocol NFS.

“This survey hits home that enterprises need a storage system that is flexible–one that has the capability to consistently deliver high performance, as well as adapt as their performance and capacity needs evolve over time,” said Rajesh Nair, CTO, Tegile. “It’s critical that a storage system today supports both block and file storage protocols and accommodate different types of storage mediums, whether it’s all flash, a mixture of flash and disk, or a mixture of high-performance flash and high-density flash.”

Tegile Systems and ActualTech Media partnered to create this report, polling over 1,000 IT professionals across the globe.