Data Growth Rates High – InformationWeek

UBM Tech‘s InformationWeek Reports, a service provider for peer-based IT research and analysis, announced the release of its latest research report. The 2013 State of Storage report analyzes results from InformationWeek‘s poll of 314 business technology decision-makers, and features exclusive trending data.

InformationWeek polled more than 300 business technology professionals, all of them involved with storage at their organizations. Survey results reveal that Ethernet is taking off, with a combined year-over-year boost of 20 points in iSCSI and FCoE. Security saw gains as well: 60% now encrypt at least some stored data. And, good help is hard to find, as 26% cite insufficient staffing as a top concern, up from 19% in 2012.

Findings:

• 63% say use of SSDs improves performance, unsurprisingly. But there’s room to grow as just 28% of solid-state users have SSDs in 31% or more of their arrays.
• 42% have 100TB or more under active management; 11% have 1OB or more, up from 9% in 2012.
• 39% of decision-makers use some sort of cloud-based storage now; an additional 32% are considering.
• 27% have consolidated storage into fewer, centrally managed systems.
• 25% retain Office and SharePoint documents indefinitely, while an additional 18% have no policy for disposal, which generally translates to “indefinite.” 12% have no disposal policy for email, which can bite a company in e-discovery situations.

The report author, Kurt Marko, is an IT industry veteran and an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor.

“Reading between the lines of this survey, we see the virtualization and ‘software-defined’ trends finally giving storage admins better ways to optimize workloads,” says Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Reports. “Of course, it’s still early days for SDN, but consolidation of storage and data networks mean that gains will benefit the entire infrastructure. Storage pros should be paying attention.”

Full access to the research data (registration needed)