Identifying virtual infrastructure mission critical performance problems immediately, including host, network and storage, has become key for organisations.
Performance and storage complexity proved to be pretty evenly cited as a current pain point for organisations and there is also a definite budget concern for companies around server and storage costs. A combined percentage (88%) of respondents cited these as their organisation's main pain points.
This was among the key findings of the ITWeb/Tintri 2016 Storage for Virtualisation survey, which ran online in January.
"The solution is to drastically reduce operating costs by automating as many manual, time consuming storage tasks as possible," says Claudio Polla, Regional Manager, Middle East Africa at Tintri, "while upgrading hardware to all-flash may relieve near term performance pain, it is not going to address operating costs," he adds.
When asked how organisations can best improve performance and control costs, Polla says: "We need to point out the difference between what traditional storage can measure and control (the performance of LUNs or volumes filled with a blend of VMs) and what enterprises care about (performance of applications consisting of VMs).
According to Polla, the ability to measure, monitor, and control performance at the VM level is indeed a game changer.
Just over half (54%) of respondents chose disk as their storage technology, which was followed closely by cloud at 51%, NAS came in third at just under half (44%).
"For primary storage, all-disk solutions don't make sense any more given the performance benefits of flash. But again, if preference for disk is being driven by cost considerations, the Opex benefits of VAS give you far more leverage than the disk vs flash choice," Polla advises.
DRAAS (disaster recovery as a service) proved popular with respondents (67%). The remaining results were pretty evenly split when respondents indicated their interest in back-up as a service (55%) and storage as a service (52%).
Polla comments on this topic, "a key benefit of DRAAS for organisations is not having to build their own disaster recovery (DR) site." He goes on to say there is also the advantage of having a vendor that does disaster recovery operations only.
"The fact is that the "spare" capacity required to fail over to a disaster recovery site could be shared by multiple tenants," Polla adds.
On the flip side, says Polla, there is a downside of the tight integration between primary and disaster recovery that makes DRAAS more complex and costly than a pure ITAAS provider.
"There are also security concerns with a shared infrastructure. Added to this is the concern of availability if more than one tenant has a disaster recovery event at one time, i.e., a regional disaster," he explains.
hybrid cloud setting the trend
It's not surprising that most companies plan on implementing some form of cloud in the near future. The survey revealed 62% of respondents will be implementing private cloud, 50% cited hybrid cloud and 20% plan on implementing public cloud.
"You could collapse this finding into a general trend that is geared towards hybrid cloud - mixing private and public resources. This makes the most sense when IT is looking to act like a service provider or broker," says Polla.
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