Most organisations are finding it difficult managing and migrating between different models and generations of storage and flash devices.
This is according to DataCore's annual State of Software-Defined Storage Survey (SDS), which involved 388 global IT professionals who were asked to identify current storage challenges that organisations are facing and what forces are driving demand for SDS.
Enterprises look for SDS to both simplify management (26%) of their incongruous storage devices and enable them to future-proof their infrastructure (21%), the report notes.
Most organisations find SDS very appealing considering that almost half of respondents identified the difficulty of migrating between different models and generations of storage devices as preventing them from using other manufacturers or models of storage devices that could well reduce their costs, says DataCore.
"This prevents them from entertaining more attractive alternatives from competing suppliers," says George Teixeira, president and CEO at DataCore. "Software-defined storage is not only designed to help organisations pool all of their available storage assets, but it allows organisations to manage end-to end and to add any type of storage asset to their existing storage architecture - helping raise productivity and keeping costs to a minimum," he adds.
One of the more interesting findings was that 63% of respondents said they have less than 10% of capacity assigned to flash storage", says, Randy Kerns, senior analyst at Evaluator Group. "With all of the hype around the 'all-flash data centre', it is clear that new fast hardware technology alone is not the answer; there are multiple critical factors preventing organisations from making this move," adds Kerns.
He also reports the lack of smart software that integrates and optimises their use, the relative high cost and the realisations that not all applications benefit from flash devices are other reasons for the lack of migration. Other reasons were the plethora of tools required to manage them and the difficulty of migrating between different models and generations, says DataCore.
IT professionals from organisations across the globe participated in the survey, with 57% of respondents from organisations with less than 1 000 employees, 23% of respondents from organisations with 1 000 to 5 000 employees, and 20% of respondents from organisations with more than 5 000 employees.
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