IT teams have rapidly expanded storage capacity, added expensive new storage arrays, and deployed a range of disparate point solutions to keep up with escalating demands. This has created a chaotic storage layer that continues to be the root of many IT challenges. We have seen that many companies are now exploring the power of consolidating storage under a single, unified, software-defined platform to simplify and optimise primary, secondary, and archive storage tiers, managed by modern technologies such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.

DataCore has just released the findings of its eighth annual survey on the state of global adoption of software-defined storage (SDS) revealing some interesting findings. Given a rather more glamorous title this year, the market survey, “Storage Diversity Seen as Imperative to IT Modernisation Efforts,” explores the data storage industry’s thoughts on technology maturity, 2020 budget planning, current and future deployment plans and key concerns for data storage management. The number of respondents grew YOY by 20%, polling 550 IT professionals worldwide across a range of verticals from a mix of organisation sizes, (ranging from 500 to 5,000+ employees) to relay the experiences of those who are currently using, or evaluating, a variety of data storage infrastructures to solve critical data storage challenges.

These storage infrastructures include software-defined storage (SDS), hyperconverged, block, file, object and Cloud storage. The expansion of the survey into areas such as Cloud hints broadly towards DataCore’s new hunting grounds of hyperconverged, Cloud, and file and object, but nonetheless provides readers with some interesting peer adoption insights to consider in their own planning.

The comprehensive 22 page report starts with a useful summary that sets the tone for the detail within the report. Key summary takeaways include:

• 73% of respondents have more than one data centre and 81% quote usage of more than one storage vendor. Dealing with heterogeneous storage infrastructures continues to be a fact of life in most IT departments—yet diversity presents its own set of management challenges.


• When asked to detail the top three capabilities that are currently lacking from respondent’s own storage infrastructure, the survey pinpoints high availability, business continuity/disaster recovery, and capacity expansion without disruption as being key grey areas.


• Limited flexibility is recorded as the top technology disappointment or false start that respondents have encountered in their storage infrastructures.


• Block storage continues as a principal investment priority in terms of powering high-performance, mission-critical applications such as databases and other enterprise applications, as well as serving as primary storage.


• In terms of deployments, 64% of respondents fell within the range of “strongly considering” software-defined storage to “standardising on it.” The top business drivers for implementing SDS are to future-proof infrastructure, to simplify management of different types of storage and to extend the life of existing storage assets.


• The adoption rate of hyperconvergence remains fairly similar to software-defined storage and is growing year on year, with 60% of respondents falling within the range of ‘strongly considering’ it to ‘standardising on’ it. HCI has seen broad adoption in recent years, but the numbers show that SDS has caught up. IT increasingly views that HCI is primarily a subset of SDS—another way to implement it.


• Containers show strong growth, with 42% of respondents deploying containers in some manner, a high percentage for a relatively new technology. However, those who are deploying containers detail they want to see better centralised management capabilities, because their top disappointments include lack of sufficient storage tools or data management services.


• Lastly, in a nod toward the importance of AI and machine learning to come, 86% of respondents agreed that predictive analytics is now important in simplifying and automating storage management

One of the most interesting key summary findings is the detail behind the top three capabilities that respondents want from their storage infrastructure but are not currently receiving. These are noted as being high availability, business continuity/disaster recovery, and capacity expansion without disruption (see diagram).

Respondents noted that when problems prevent applications from reaching data at one location, high availability without downtime needs to kick in fast and currently fails to do so. While they are seeking “zero downtime, zero touch” failover to maximise business continuity, respondents identify they require capabilities such as synchronous data mirroring and failover to mirrored copies to occur instantaneously and automatically without disruption, scripting or manual intervention. Similarly, built-in automation should take care of resynchronisation and failback to normal operations after the original cause of the outage is resolved.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning were cited as the second disappointment area, with the survey being completed before the impact of COVID-19 hit fully. The backdrop to this disappointment is easier to understand than high availability disappointments. Previously, organisations standardised on a single all-inclusive model of data storage. But these days such singularity is neither practical nor affordable, resulting in multiple diverse systems that make up the storage infrastructure.

Viable alternatives separate business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) functions from the discrete storage systems. This is accomplished by up-levelling the services responsible for data replication, snapshots, continuous data protection and roll-backs into a device-independent layer. With a uniform control plane for BC/DR data services in place, the location, topology and type of data storage become interchangeable.

Adding extra storage capacity without disruption is listed as the third concern, with many forward-looking IT initiatives stopped dead in their tracks due to the potential for disruption. Yet the survey shows that unprecedented data growth continues requiring continuous expansion of storage, but the technologies involved are often simply too different, with very diverse methods of operation. This is especially true when introducing new options to the storage infrastructure.

The procedures for provisioning capacity, protecting data and monitoring behaviour vary drastically from one model to another — even among those from the same manufacturer. However, these difficulties may be sidestepped with a universal control plane that treats new storage options as interchangeable components under a common set of administrative services. The user employs the same familiar operations to allocate disk space, safeguard data and track the overall health and performance of the storage resources — varied as they may be.

When DataCore released their first survey back in 2012, most of the industry was still functioning in a hardware-centric mindset—leaving users skeptical about the true promise of SDS. However, with years of now proven success, SDS is well on its way to becoming a standard technology that DataCore wanted it to be back then, with 64% of survey respondents falling within the range of “strongly considering” to “standardising” on software-defined storage.

“IT teams have rapidly expanded storage capacity, added expensive new storage arrays, and deployed a range of disparate point solutions to keep up with escalating demands. This has created a chaotic storage layer that continues to be the root of many IT challenges,” said Gerardo Dada, chief marketing officer at DataCore. “We have seen that many companies are now exploring the power of consolidating storage under a single, unified, software-defined platform to simplify and optimise primary, secondary, and archive storage tiers, managed by modern technologies such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.”

To view the complete report, please visit: www.datacore.com/document/8th-annual-storage-industry-report