Cloud computing is going mainstream, and is beginning to transform roles and priorities within the enterprise data storage infrastructure.
Data from 451 Research’s most recent Voice of the Enterprise (VoTE) storage study suggests storage professionals are no longer wholly preoccupied with adding storage capacity.
Instead, attention is turning to other priorities, most notably ensuring that data and applications are adequately protected in the event of a failure, outage or more serious disaster.
Although respondents to the survey – conducted in January 2017 – still highlighted data/capacity growth as the number one storage pain point, this figure was down almost 10% on a year ago.
Data growth still continues unabated, but the impact of this growth is diminished as organisations utilise a variety of cloud services – in particular, public cloud – to shoulder the burden, especially for backup and archiving. Organisations are increasingly moving to hybrid cloud environments, bringing new providers into the mix (chiefly public cloud providers).
Meanwhile, the survey highlighted some other changes in what remains a turbulent storage market.
Fewer respondents cited high capex costs as a top storage pain point (although it was still cited by almost a quarter), which can be read as evidence of aggressive pricing by storage array makers and makes it a good time to buy storage.
Meanwhile, the number of respondents citing storage performance as a top pain point was down year-on-year – perhaps evidence that the implementation of flash-based technologies is beginning to have an impact on performance challenges.
But in other areas, pain points increased year on year.
Perhaps most notably, the number of respondents citing “growth from new applications” more than doubled year on year, suggesting that many new-style applications – such as big data workloads, container-based applications and micro-services – are now starting to impinge on the storage function as they evolve and become more critical to the business.
Although respondents to the survey – conducted in January 2017 – still highlighted data/capacity growth as the number one storage pain point, this figure was down almost 10% on a year ago.
Data growth still continues unabated, but the impact of this growth is diminished as organisations utilise a variety of cloud services – in particular, public cloud – to shoulder the burden, especially for backup and archiving. Organisations are increasingly moving to hybrid cloud environments, bringing new providers into the mix (chiefly public cloud providers).
Meanwhile, the survey highlighted some other changes in what remains a turbulent storage market.
Fewer respondents cited high capex costs as a top storage pain point (although it was still cited by almost a quarter), which can be read as evidence of aggressive pricing by storage array makers and makes it a good time to buy storage.
Meanwhile, the number of respondents citing storage performance as a top pain point was down year-on-year – perhaps evidence that the implementation of flash-based technologies is beginning to have an impact on performance challenges.
But in other areas, pain points increased year on year.
Perhaps most notably, the number of respondents citing “growth from new applications” more than doubled year on year, suggesting that many new-style applications – such as big data workloads, container-based applications and micro-services – are now starting to impinge on the storage function as they evolve and become more critical to the business.
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