Maxta,
a leader in hyper-convergence and software-defined storage, today
released results of an independent study conducted by 451 Research of IT
purchasers in midmarket companies. A few hundred companies with annual
revenues of $100 million to $1 billion
were surveyed. The survey, sponsored by Maxta and Intel, revealed a
strong interest in deploying Software-Defined Storage (SDS), with 96% of
respondents stating that they were "somewhat or very likely" to adopt
SDS and 82% stating they were "somewhat or very likely" to adopt a
hyper-converged infrastructure. Midmarket storage management problems,
often similar to those of larger enterprises, were seen in the survey,
amplified by the need for simplification of IT management. These
challenges were compounded by additional difficulties in finding staff
to maintain complex storage infrastructures. The research findings also
confirmed that midmarket companies are very willing to take on new
technologies that will help them with the vexing problem of exponential
storage growth.
Survey Highlights Software-Defined Storage
Midmarket
companies are showing strong adoption of server virtualization
solutions, with a strong interest in SDS solutions. Simplifying storage
infrastructure management is seen as a major driver, with VM-level
management seen as one of the most appealing features, followed by
improving data protection, data integrity and scalability. CAPEX savings
have not been a driving factor.
- 96 percent of respondents are aware of SDS, with 71 percent of
respondents stating they were "somewhat likely" to consider deploying
SDS, while 25 percent said they were "very likely."
- 77 percent of companies surveyed indicated that 50 percent or more of their servers are already virtualized.
- Given the strong rate of adoption of virtualized servers, it is not
surprising that 52 percent of respondents cite simplification of storage
management as the key consideration to move to SDS, with 61 percent
stating VM-level storage management as the main appeal to move to SDS.
High-level skill sets needed to manage complex storage (35 percent),
followed closely by the complexity itself (35 percent) were noted as top
challenges.
- 53 percent seek compression and a consistent interest was displayed
in enterprise-class data services such as thin provisioning, tiering,
de-duplication, snapshots and cloning.
- 40 percent seek to improve their data protection policies with SDS
and 35 percent cite SDS snapshots and cloning as a motivator to SDS.
- Maintaining data integrity across different systems was a challenge
for 46 percent, with scalability being highlighted by 41 percent as a
motivator to move to SDS.
- 53 percent of respondents want the ability to support mixed drive
types – server side, SSD, spinning disk, indicating broad use case and
workload interest.
- Somewhat surprising was that only 16 percent of respondents selected
price (CAPEX) or the ability to deploy on less expensive commodity x86
hardware as a significant benefit of SDS solutions.
Survey Highlights Hyper-Convergence
Respondents'
interest in hyper-convergence appears to be driven by the reduction of
operating expenses which many would find synonymous with the
simplification of IT management. Half of the respondents cited that cost
savings would be part of their evaluation consideration. Compatibility
and configuration also made the list of concerns validating the need for
reference architectures and ordering simplicity. Maxta has seen strong
interest in MaxDeploy™ reference architectures, which provide
pre-configured and pre-validated solutions that can run on any x86
server platform, with recent evaluators of hyper-converged solutions
expressing strong interest in MaxDeploy running on both Intel and
Supermicro servers. These solutions provide organizations greater than
30% savings over a hyper-converged solution running on branded server
platforms and greater than 55% savings compared to an appliance-based
hyper-converged architecture.
- 87 percent of respondents were aware of hyper-convergence, with 82
percent of respondents stating they were "somewhat likely" or "very
likely" to consider a hyper-converged infrastructure; 36 percent of
those aware of hyper-convergence stated they were unclear of the total
benefits and/or full meaning of hyper-convergence, indicating that an
improved understanding could increase results to be more consistent with
the SDS findings.
- 62 percent state simplification of IT infrastructure as a key motivator to consider hyper-convergence.
- More than SDS at 35 percent, 52 percent of respondents are seeking
to reduce management and operational costs with hyper-convergence. 50
percent stated they would want to see a cost savings use case as part of
their evaluation process.
- 29 percent shared some concern about compatibility and configuration
along with 42 percent requiring a demo as part of the evaluation
process. Results indicate a need for pre-configured systems and
validated reference architectures.
- Fueling the debate of whether hyper-convergence is a virtualization
or storage purchase, 37 percent would evaluate hyper-convergence in the
same way they evaluated server virtualization and 28 percent in the same
way they would evaluate a storage array.