Many US Enterprises Manage More Than 20 Different Types of Storage

Primary Data, Inc. announced the results of a survey of IT industry professionals that underscores the increasing complexity of today’s enterprise storage landscape.

As new solutions such as all-flash systems, cloud storage, and emerging technologies like hyperconverged storage are adopted alongside traditional SAN and NAS storage, 51% of the IT administrators surveyed report managing 10 or more different types of storage, while one-third of the respondents reported overseeing more than 20 different storage resources.

“The results of this survey echo what we have been hearing from customers: Enterprises have many storage options, but need a way to finally integrate the diverse capabilities of their storage investments to meet evolving business needs,” said Lance Smith, Primary Data, CEO. “The Primary Data DataSphere platform is a software-defined solution that enables enterprises to finally put all of their different storage resources to work efficiently by uniting storage silos within a single, global dataspace. By moving data automatically to the right type of storage for dynamic business requirements across performance, protection and price, enterprises gain the flexibility and agility needed to meet modern datacenter demands.“

The anonymous survey respondents were primarily based in the United States, and work at companies ranging from over 100 to more than 5,000 employees.

The largest enterprises most commonly reported having over 20 different storage types to manage. However, even smaller companies reported significant storage diversity, underscoring how growing businesses today leverage numerous storage options to meet different needs. 28% of the respondents reported managing 2 to 4 storage systems, 22% reported supporting 5 to 9 systems, and the remaining 51% managed 10 or more different storage products.

While 36% of those surveyed reported having one or two storage vendors, nearly two-thirds of the professionals participating in the survey reported using storage systems from three to nine different providers.

The Primary Data DataSphere platform is a storage-independent solution that overcomes the challenges of maintaining multiple separate storage systems by uniting existing storage silos in a single, global dataspace through data virtualization. It provides an abstraction layer that separates the data path from the control path to create a dataspace that connects different storage types and access protocols across file, block and object storage. IT professionals set data objectives that then ensure data is automatically placed on the right storage, at the right place, at the right time, to meet business objectives. This simplifies data management across all primary and secondary storage systems, from flash to SAN and NAS storage to the cloud, creating pools of resources that are easy to monitor, maintain, and scale.

“IDC believes a fundamental characteristic of SDS is that the software stack (controller software) is fully decoupled from the underlying hardware,” noted Ashish Nadkarni, IDC program director in the report, Software-Defined Storage: Market Background, Trends, and Taxonomy, 2015.”This means that the SDS controller software makes no assumption of the underlying hardware and therefore can run on any type of hardware platform.”

The DataSphere architecture leverages the IDC-supported approach to software-defined storage to help enterprises maximize the value of the storage they already have, while enabling companies to scale simply to meet future demands. To add more capacity or performance, storage administrators add new resources to the DataSphere global dataspace. DataSphere then automates the movement of data to the new storage to maximize efficiency across all resources in the global dataspace, simplifying the complexity of managing today’s diverse enterprise storage landscapes.