Report: SDS Adoption Growing Amid Virtualization Hiccups

Although software-defined storage initiatives can prove challenging for many enterprises who grew up with traditional spinning disk technology, several drivers continue to push businesses to implement the new tech as companies look to eliminate downtime and lower total costs within their storage infrastructures.

These findings came from DataCore Software’s fifth annual State of Software-Defined Storage market survey, which polled 477 IT professionals globally in April to understand their expectations and experiences in using and evaluating SDS technology.

Among the top responses as to why software-defined storage continues to grow in popularity, 52 percent of respondents said extending the life of their existing storage assets and future-proofing the storage infrastructure as the top reason for making the jump. An additional 49 percent look to SDS to avoid hardware lock-in and simultaneously lower hardware costs, according to the study. The drive to simplify the management of different classes by automating storage operations also ranked among the top reasons companies are interested in software-defined storage.

When asked specifically about storage virtualization, 52 percent of respondents said the ability to add storage capacity without business disruption was their highest priority. However, storage virtualization was not seen as an immediate fix to application problems: About 34 percent of respondents also said determining storage requirements became more difficult after virtualizing their business applications, while 31 percent said application response was slower after making the switch to virtualized storage. Consequently, 61 percent of respondents said slow applications were a major cause of performance problems, signaling that virtualized storage is far from an absolute fix to legacy solutions.

Despite the differences between the proposed power of software-defined storage and the reality of its effect on individual businesses, companies continue to look to virtualized storage as a means of preventing human error. According to the study, 61 percent of respondents said human error was to blame for application and data center outages, which outpaced all other factors including heating and ventilation failure, fire, construction work and vandalism.

So are we headed toward a future where all storage is contained on solid-state drives? Probably not, according to DataCore. While the overall amount of flash technology has increased since last year’s survey, DataCore believes the IT industry will continue to balance traditional spinning disk arrays with flash to balance cost and performance.

Another area of significant interest among respondents was the utilization of cloud storage as a means of data protection and disaster recovery, with 47 percent of respondents currently looking into public/hybrid cloud storage and 57 percent evaluating private cloud storage for self-service IT and automated storage provisioning.

But where interest in software-defined storage seems to be growing, a majority of companies still are not investing money in other new technologies, including Big Data, object-storage and hyper-converged systems, according to the study. Instead, businesses continue to move away from storage functions tied to specific hardware and invest in software-defined storage and storage virtualization increase their overall availability, performance and cost savings.

While it’s important to regard such a pro-SDS study with a grain of salt, it’s equally important to understand that companies continue to do everything in their power to eliminate downtime and reduce cost through the use of both old and new storage technology.

It’s much too early in the game to make hard and fast predictions about the future of SDS within businesses, but with heavy hitters such as IBM (IBM) and VMware (VMW) looming large in the virtualization space, you would be hard-pressed to argue that the future of SDS is written in stone.