Inktank, the company delivering Ceph – the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system – today announced the results of a survey conducted at Red Hat Summit April 14-17, 2014, in San Francisco, Calif.

The on-site survey polled IT executives, storage architects, development managers, developers and engineers, operations and quality assurance and other business stakeholders. The survey found:

• Open Source Storage Solutions Are in the Majority – 62 percent of respondents said that their organizations use open source storage solutions.
• Open Source Storage Increasingly an IT Investment – 58 percent of respondents said they have evaluated open source storage solutions in the last 12 months. 75 percent plan on increasing their investment in open source storage solutions.
• Ceph Gaining Traction – 32 percent of respondents are either currently evaluating Ceph or planning to evaluate it, 11 percent are using Ceph today and eight percent are planning to use it within the next year or two.
• Major Storage Pain Points: Cost and Flexibility – Cost topped the list as the biggest storage pain point for respondents within their organizations today (40 percent), followed by flexibility at 18 percent.
• Data Centers Moving Toward Open Source – 48 percent of respondents said that when considering their data centers, servers were the area most likely to move toward open source. This was followed by storage at 31 percent and networking at eight percent.
• Innovation Needed in Storage Industry – When asked where they saw the greatest need for innovation in the storage industry, 30 percent chose cost, with another 30 percent also choosing performance. Flexibility closely followed at 22 percent and scalability at 13 percent.

“With cost and flexibility cited as some of the largest storage challenges for enterprises, it’s clear that innovation is sorely needed in storage—both within organizations and in the storage industry,” said Bryan Bogensberger, CEO of Inktank. “Today’s enterprises need storage solutions that aren’t expensive and restrictive, and are exploring new avenues to best meet their changing storage needs. It’s not a surprise then that open source storage is gaining adoption. It’s critical that the storage industry rises to meet the challenges of these organizations to solve these growing storage pain points.”