The majority of South African organisations have not experienced a storage-related outage within the past 12 months.
This is one of the biggest takeaways from the ITWeb/EMC Southern Africa Storage Survey, which ran online for 14 days in April 2014.
It emerged from the survey that 55.79% of respondents have not experienced a storage-related outage over the period.
On the other hand, 20% revealed that they had experienced a storage-related outage with an impact to business; while 17.89% said their organisation had experienced an outage but with no business impact.
"Perhaps the best prevention is to not to have an outage at all," says says Delon Karrim, EMC Southern Africa's senior systems engineer, Advanced Storage Division, commenting on the results.
He believes that adopting an adequate virtualisation strategy enables an organisation to perform to higher standards; while the ability to sufficiently store and manage data is a critical component of efficient and agile IT infrastructures.
"With the emergence of software-defined storage offerings, hyper-converged platform offerings and the drive to commodity storage platforms on the rise, customers benefit by getting enterprise features that are very well-priced. Customers should still evaluate the needs of their business and align these with the platform under evaluation," says Karrim.
The storage survey asked what the key factor is when choosing a storage vendor and the results were pretty much evenly split, the highest score being cost (26.80%); the performance factor came in second at 23.71%; and business strategy was third at 16.49%.
According to the survey, 42.71% of the respondents believe the rate at which data is growing within their organisation is between 0%-20%; 37.50% answered between 20%-40% growth; and only 5.21% cited higher than 40%.
Karrim is of the view that if the data growth rate and consumption are known, business is then able to more accurately forecast purchasing of additional disk.
"This can help them to control costs more effectively. They will know exactly how much capacity to buy and when this purchase should happen. Customers will need some type of monitoring tool to be able to do this with ease," he adds.
"This could be done manually with one or more people resources monitoring and logging the data in Excel. This may work in a small to medium business, but this model usually breaks when the organisation begins to scale."
When asked if they have an end view of their storage to host infrastructure, 49.47% of respondents answered 'yes', and 50.53% stated 'no'.
"With an end-to-end view, you're able to pin-point performance problems with ease. You can get alerts from any point in the infrastructure alerting you of pathing issues which could potentially impact availability."
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