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2016 State of Storage

In spring 2016 we surveyed hundreds of data center professionals from around the world. Following is a summary of their storage pains and priorities.

How big is your storage footprint?

  • >1 PB: 24.44%
  • 500-999 TB: 12.78%
  • 100-499 TB: 25.56%
  • 10-99 TB: 23.68%
  • <10 TB: 8.65%
  • Don’t know: 4.89%

Who manages your storage footprint? (Most common response:)

  • Third-party service provider (Footprint <10 TB): 13%
  • IT generalist (Footprint 10-99 TB): 36%
  • Part-time storage expert (Footprint 100-999 TB): 25%
  • Dedicated storage expert (Footprint 1 PB+): 52%

What storage management tools are you using most often?

  • Excel spreadsheets: 31%
  • Third-party tools: 30%
  • Pen and paper: 6%

Oh no! Too many organizations are in spreadsheet hell. It’s the heat and pressure that comes from managing a growing volume of virtual machines in a LUN-based storage environment. That’s because the admin often has to use a spreadsheet to “map” hundreds or thousands of virtual machines to their respective LUNs, and try to keep track of everything as it’s in motion.

What are the biggest storage challenges you have today?

  • Manageability (admin time and effort): 49% (39% in 2015)
  • Performance (latency): 46% (50% in 2015)
  • Scale (managing growth): 42% (40% in 2015)
  • Capital expenses (reduce spend): 41% (41% in 2015)
  • Operating expenses (reduce ongoing cost): 32% (28% in 2015)
  • Cloud (changing business model): 24% (21% in 2015)
  • Security (data availability and safety): 22% (28% in 2015)
  • Vendor lock-in (no freedom of choice): 16% (14% in 2015)

OK, so what steps are you taking to address storage challenges?

  • Exploring new technologies: 68.64%
  • Exploring new storage vendors: 47.88%
  • Provisioning additional storage from current vendor: 31.78%
  • Nothing; living with current pain points: 12.29%
  • Outsourcing more responsibility to third party/cloud service provider: 9.75%
  • Adding headcount and/or skillsets to the team: 9.32%

And if you are expecting relief to come from new technologies, which are you exploring right now?

  • Hybrid flash storage: 59.82%
  • VM-aware storage: 52.05%
  • All-flash storage: 44.29%
  • Hyper-converged: 32.42%
  • Software-defined storage 29.68%
  • Converged systems: 27.85%
  • Off-premise cloud: 25.57%

What are the buying criteria that matter most when selecting new storage?

  1. Performance
  2. Integration with existing infrastructure
  3. Easy to scale
  4. Cost per gigabyte

Bottom line:

If you’re like the State of Storage study respondents, then you’re dealing with manageability and performance pain. That’s precisely why you need to see storage dierently and find a platform that can guarantee the performance of your virtualized applications, integrate seamlessly (even across hypervisors) and scale-out with simplicity.

Sound like you need Tintri?

You can get hands-on with Tintri VMstore right now at explore..devtintrinew.wpengine.com, and learn more about managing storage in a fraction of the time and money.

Every organization faces different storage problems—with different performance pains, capital expense stresses and other daily obstacles.

In the 2016 State of Storage report—our second annual—we take a detailed look at:

  • Organizations’ biggest storage challenges and what steps they’re taking to address them
  • What new technologies organizations are exploring to heal their pains
  • What buying criteria organizations find most important when it comes to storage

Check it out and use the results to help benchmark your own storage processes. Do your problems align with those of your peers? What about your solutions? Download our report.

Numbers from the State of Storage

Last year, we learned that 66 percent of respondents worked for organizations where over half of all workloads were virtualized—and yet cost per gigabyte still beat cost per VM when it came to buying storage.

This year, we have even more information. For example, did you know that 31 percent of respondents still use Excel spreadsheets as storage management tools? What about the fact that 49 percent of respondents consider manageability their biggest storage challenge—up 10 percent from last year?

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