Avere Responds to Storage Study

The fact that IT executives are challenged with managing storage growth isn't surprising, but some of the findings of this survey are.

Between July 14 and August 10, Gatepoint Research invited more than 1,000 select executives to participate in the Next Generation Storage Performance survey, which asked them about their top storage challenges. The top responses were managing storage growth (77 percent) and managing costs (72 percent). Also, more than 66 percent of responders consider performance scaling decisively important—accomplished mainly by short-stroking HDDs, adding more HDDs and NAS controller upgrades.

"Power and space resources continue to rise by throwing more disks at the problem in an attempt to keep up with performance demand, illustrating that traditional disk-based NAS filers have become very inefficient in matching performance and capacity requirements." said Rebecca Thompson of Avere Systems. "Rather than over-provisioning storage capacity for modest gains in application performance—a choice that requires ever-increasing amounts of power and limited data center space—companies should instead investigate tiered NAS solutions that provide the ability to scale performance with the application and provide a 5:1 reduction in disks, power, and rackspace.”

Among the survey’s other findings:

• 90 percent of responders have mixed NAS-SAN network storage

• 74 percent manage more than 100TB of storage capacity

• Oracle and VMware are the major sources of performance demand

Candidates invited to participate in the Next Generation Storage Performance survey were invited via email with each agreeing to participate voluntarily. Seventy-five percent of responders were employed by companies with annual revenues of $1 billion or more; 43 percent with $10 billion or more. Fifty-nine percent of responders work at the director level or above. For full summary results, visit http://www.averesystems.com

Avere Systems offers an excellent tiered NAS solution in its Avere FXT Series, which contains both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media to optimize performance on all types of workloads. Reads, writes, and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere’s unique approach to dynamic tiering. Movement of data occurs in real-time—not in hours or days—and occurs at the file level or even block level with a file. All of this is done automatically by the system; there are no complex policies to configure or update.

Learn more at www.averesystems.com, or follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.