Condusiv Technologies has published its latest study of IT leadership awareness and management of input/output (I/O) issues and their effect on system productivity. The 2019 I/O Performance Survey was conducted during the third and fourth quarters of 2018; it represents the responses of nearly a thousand IT professionals worldwide, in banking, healthcare, financial compliance, and other data-intensive fields. "This is the fifth time we've conducted this study," says Condusiv CEO James D'Arezzo. "We have a solid set of data now, and the results of the 2019 survey bear out and validate the basic findings of our previous four reports."

D'Arezzo, whose company is the world leader in I/O reduction and SQL database performance, adds, "What is clear as we look at year-over-year results is that while investments in new storage technologies have provided additional capacity and some performance improvements, new hardware has failed to become the hoped-for solution to I/O performance degradation."

The 906 IT professionals responding to the 2019 Condusiv survey represented organizations ranging in size from 100-999 employees (29.8%), 1,000-9,999 employees (44.5%), and 10,000 employees and above (25.7%). Respondents were drawn from the ranks of senior IT management with titles such as CIO, CTO, EVP, or director (19.09%), IT managers, system administrators, and analysts (63.02%), other IT (15.68%), and senior business management (2.21%).

Key findings of the study include:

• I/O performance is important. The vast majority of those surveyed (88.6%) consider I/O performance an important part of their responsibilities.
• Application performance is suffering. Nearly half of respondents (45.8%) indicate they have applications that are difficult to support from a systems performance standpoint.
• SQL is the most troublesome application. The survey confirms that SQL databases are the top business-critical application platform and also the environment that generates the most I/O traffic. Nearly a third of respondents (27.7%) report experiencing staff/customer complaints due to sluggish applications running on SQL.

Over half of respondents reported that they were unaware of the fact that Windows write inefficiencies generate increasingly smaller writes, multiplying the amount of I/O traffic involved in executing any given task. They were also unaware that this is not a hardware issue, but a software issue.

A quite possibly related finding, notes D'Arezzo, is that about three-fourths of surveyed IT professionals said they plan to continue investing in hardware to improve I/O performance.

"They'll be overspending," D'Arezzo says, "because you can't solve the problem by just adding hardware. Instead, organizations would be much better off optimizing the capacity of the hardware they already have. It can be done easily, and it can be done at low cost. We've developed software products that can improve overall system throughput by 30% to 50% without the need to buy any new machinery."