Enterprises Manage More than 20 Different Storage Systems – Primary Data

Primary Data, Inc. announced the results of its 2017 Storage Census survey.

The study showcased that IT leaders face conflicting pressures, as those surveyed included delivering performance, executing data migrations, meeting expectations with existing budgets, and integrating the cloud among the biggest challenges facing their departments today.

To help companies facing these challenges, the company unveiled its new Data Profiler tool. The Data Profiler can operate independently of Primary Data’s DataSphere, and analyzes metadata to assess enterprise storage utilization, evaluate data management strategies and project the savings possible by leveraging cloud or on-premises object storage resources. When deployed with DataSphere, enterprises can quickly put their customized data management strategies into action with automated data migration across their enterprise infrastructure and the cloud.

“The trends we’re seeing in the 2017 Storage Census emphasize that infrastructure is costly, but is still not very effective in meeting the needs of today’s enterprises,” said Lance Smith, Primary Data CEO. “Performance remains a noisy problem, and the lack of insight into data forces IT to overprovision and overspend even though the professionals surveyed know that the majority of their data is actually sitting idle. With our new Data Profiler, IT can easily evaluate the insight, power and unprecedented control made possible with an enterprise metadata engine. The Data Profiler makes it easy to explore data management strategies that help enterprises deliver both performance and savings using their unique storage ecosystem. Once integrated with DataSphere, admins can put their objectives into action in just a few clicks.”

“In the race to create automated infrastructure environments with rapid provisioning and elasticity, fiscal responsibility often gets neglected as organizations attempt to satisfy their end users’ need for speed and capacity,” said Henry Baltazar, research VP, Storage, 451 Research. “Intelligent features such as the new Data Profiler in Primary Data’s DataSphere platform could be helpful for organizations that want to maximize the utilization and efficiency of their large storage environments.”

The Primary Data survey was conducted at VMworld 2017, where attendees were anonymously asked about storage and data management at their enterprise. The majority of the 313 respondents worked at large enterprises with over 1,000 to 5,000 and more employees, and their companies were mostly over ten years old.

Underscoring the complexity managed by enterprise IT departments today, the survey found that:
• 38% of respondents selected performance as their biggest challenge for IT, making it the most pressing IT issue named in the survey
• Data migrations were the second most common headache for 36% of those surveyed
• Budget challenges (35%) and cloud adoption (27%) closely followed among the top concerns for respondents
• The majority of organizations estimate that at least 60% of their data is cold
• 27% of organizations manage twenty or more storage systems, 44% manage ten or more storage systems

DataSphere is an enterprise metadata engine that delivers live data mobility without application disruption across enterprise infrastructure and the cloud. Enterprises can automate live data migration, easily adopt cloud storage, increase performance, and automate VM storage management to maximize efficiency in virtualized environments. Through data virtualization, DataSphere separates the data path from the control path and creates a global namespace to give applications simultaneous access to diverse storage resources.

The new Data Profiler tool enables enterprises to determine how data policies affect storage performance, capacity, and overall budget by analyzing metadata activity and the costs of each storage tier. Using a slider to evaluate the impact of moving data to another resource, such as high-performance flash or cloud object storage, admins can see how different data management strategies reduce total storage costs. The Data Profiler provides a number of data points that change according to the chosen objectives, including cost per storage tier, number of files per tier, capacity per tier, and total cost of the analyzed global storage ecosystem. Data tiers can be easily added to the Data Profiler to evaluate policies using the resources available in each customer’s unique environment.

Once IT chooses the strategy for their performance and budget needs, the DataSphere policy engine allows IT to set custom objectives or choose from a catalog of options to meet data performance, price or protection requirements. Automated data mobility ensures the right data is served by the right storage resource for changing enterprise needs, transparently to applications. Over time, machine learning can help IT invest in the right storage for their application demands. Metadata analytics provide insight on data activity at the file level, giving IT the visibility needed to take full control over the management of their storage resources.