IT administrators and leaders are now more worried by manageability than performance when it comes to data storage, says a survey of 300 data centre professionals, conducted by storage vendor Tintri.
The annual State of Storage for virtualised enterprises study shows that, unlike Tintri’s 2015 State of Storage survey, when performance and latency topped the list of storage pain points, this year nealry half (49%) of respondents identified their biggest concern as manageability—a jump of 10%age points. At the same time, more than one third of respondents said they still rely on antiquated spreadsheets to manage and map their virtual machines.
Respondents noted that their virtual footprint continues to grow, with one in three indicating that 90% of their applications are virtualised, and four in five were at least half virtualised. One-half of the survey-takers oversee at least 500 virtual machines and more than one-quarter manage 1,000 or more virtual machines.
“The storage landscape and its challenges continue to evolve,” said Yael Zheng, chief marketing officer at Tintri. “While performance remains a top challenge, IT professionals are increasingly concerned about the challenge of managing a complex virtualised infrastructure. Especially at scale—as virtualised and cloud environments expand to tens of thousands of VMs, the burden on IT to manage storage with reduced staffing, predict future growth and maintain uptime will stretch resources to a breaking point.”
The survey also examined the manageability challenges that come with a growing virtual footprint. According to responses, here’s how these challenges are being met:
After manageability, the top storage pain points were performance (46%), scale (42%), and capital expenses (41%)
Some 68% of respondents indicated that they are evaluating new technologies, with 48% evaluating new storage vendors
Of those evaluating new storage vendors, 52% are evaluating VM-aware storage, and 44% are looking at all-flash storage options
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