THE ROLLING STONES’ SONG “”You Can’t Always Get What You Want”” could apply to how IT professionals feel about their storage infrastructure. The top capabilities they want, but feel they aren’t getting, are high availability, business continuity/disaster recovery, capacity expansion without disruption, and faster application responsiveness, according to the recent report Storage Diversity Seen as Imperative to IT Modernization Efforts. This eighth market survey from DataCore Software finds that software-defined storage may just give them what they need.
The top business driver for implementing software-defined storage is future-proofing the infrastructure (54%), followed by simplifying management of different types of storage (50%), extending the life of existing storage assets (43%), business continuity/disaster recovery (40%), and lowering hardware costs (40%).
Asked where current storage infrastructures have fallen short, respondents cite limited flexibility (35%) as the top disappointment, followed by cloud storage that failed to reduce costs (32%), difficulty of scaling to capacity (31%), being locked into a storage vendor (29%).
A majority of respondents (64%) report they are now strongly considering or standardizing on software-defined storage, and it tops the list of what respondents (35%) are planning as their primary storage for the future, followed by hyperconverged storage (26%), traditional SAN (19%), and scale-out file storage (7%).
You can follow the money trail too, with 21% of respondents allocating more than a quarter of their storage budget in 2020 to software-defined storage, topped only by file storage, for which 24% are allocating more than 25% of their budget.
The report’s findings conclude that as organizations continue to struggle with unprecedented data growth, combined with the current economic downturn and some hardware shortages caused by COVID-19, there is “”increasing movement toward software-defined infrastructure to address many of the industry’s pain points.””
Channel pros may want to get ready to tell customers they can get what they want.
Image: iStock
