SolidFire, a developer of all-flash storage systems, has revealed the results of an independent market research survey that offers insights into how IT professionals are using and benefitting from various storage automation tools and practices. The report, conducted by independent research organization TechValidate and comprised of over 300 global IT professionals who are not current SolidFire customers, details the drivers behind storage automation, what tools and interfaces IT professionals are using, preferences around storage management plug-ins and software development kits, and benefits realized by implementing storage automation.
The Storage Automation Usage and Trends Report revealed the following findings:
- Storage automation is predominantly addressing immediate problems of today, and IT professionals have not yet significantly transitioned to tools that can accommodate next-generation strategies of IT deployment.
- VMware, as the virtualization/hypervisor market share leader, has a large contingent of organizations utilizing its tools for storage automation.
- VMware vRealize being the most popular (42 percent), while Microsoft System Center (16 percent), OpenStack (15 percent), and Microsoft Powershell (15 percent).
- OpenStack, while not showing overwhelming usage currently, is notably being investigated or actively considered by many existing VMware, System Center, and PowerShell users.
- 26 percent of respondents and 51 percent of current VMware automation users indicate they are considering implementing OpenStack in the next year. Containers, too, are poised to be a disruptive force to traditional, virtualized environments.
- 38 percent of surveyed IT organizations who are using OpenStack are currently using or considering Docker.
“The insights gleaned from this report confirm that storage automation is one of the key goals in transitioning to a next generation data center,” says SolidFire’s VP of Corporate Development & Strategy, Dave Cahill. “While storage infrastructure has long been the least extensible component of the data center, the flexibility and simplicity of SolidFire’s API and integrations with leading management frameworks, like OpenStack, vSphere and PowerShell, allow organizations to completely automate their data centers and realize the full value of their storage investment without compromise.”
The Storage Automation Usage and Trends Report collected quantitative data from more than 300 responses from IT professionals around the world. The full study that includes additional insights and graphics is available here.
