Demand for virtual workloads sparks storage evolution

Hybrid-flash is prevailing over all-flash as virtualisation hits critical tipping point in the enterprise, according to the 2016 State of Storage in Virtualisation report released by ActualTech Media and Tegile Systems. Additionally, other findings from the survey suggest that as virtualisation further penetrates the data centre market, companies are re-examining their systems and best practices, sparking a renaissance in the storage landscape.

 

“Virtualisation as a trend has been growing steadily for some time now, but available tools have now achieved the credibility to convince IT to move even the largest or most important workloads to a virtual environment,” said Scott D. Lowe, partner and cofounder of ActualTech Media. “In this survey, we found that virtualisation and storage are at a fascinating intersection right now, leading to bigger and faster virtualisation and an exciting evolution of the storage market.”

 

Notable findings from the survey include:

 

A rising number of enterprises are turning to virtual machines to power greater workloads, even across their most mission-critical systems. Results highlighted:

?        Over 60 percent of respondents operate with a majority of their environment virtualised, with 97 percent having at least some of their workloads virtualised.

?        Of those, 66 percent have virtualised Microsoft SQL Server®.

?        Among applications that generate large workloads, file sharing, Microsoft Exchange®, and Microsoft SharePoint® are virtualised by 53 percent, 49 percent, and 45 percent respectively.

 

Flash hybrid systems have emerged and established themselves as the undisputed industry standard among modern, virtualised enterprises. Results highlight:  

?        61 percent of respondents indicate they currently use a hybrid storage array within their data centre.

?        23 percent of respondents use all-flash arrays in combination with other storage infrastructure, whilst only 3 percent run their entire storage environment using all-flash.

?        Over 70 percent of respondents cite improving existing application response times as a key driver for deploying flash storage.

 

Companies continue to struggle with storage systems that do not deliver the performance, capacity, and functionality they require, signalling an urgent demand for fast, flexible storage solutions. Results highlight:

?        53 percent of respondents indicate that they experience storage performance issues, and 58 percent reveal a level of capacity issues.

?        56 percent of respondents report using multiple storage protocols, with 30 percent using three or more protocols.

?        Block-level protocols are most popular for virtualised environments, with 48 percent of respondents indicating they use Fibre Channel and 42 percent stating they use iSCSI. 36 percent report using the file-level protocol NFS.

 

“This survey hits home that enterprises need a storage system that is flexible, has the capability to consistently deliver high performance and can be scaled to meet its evolving performance and capacity needs over time,” said Rajesh Nair, CTO of Tegile Systems. “It’s critical that a storage system today supports both block and file storage protocols and accommodates different types of storage mediums, whether it’s all flash, a mixture of flash and disk, or a mixture of high-performance flash and high-density flash.”