A third of respondents (32%) to a recent survey, conducted by ITWEb in partnership with Pinnacle and Dell Technologies, said they’d updated their storage solution less than a year ago, while another third (33%) said they’d updated within the past three years.
Three-quarters of the survey’s respondents (72%) said they were using Cloud-as-a-Service for their backup storage solution, 43% said they used Network Attached Storage and 33% used Storage Area Network. Some 18% used Direct Attached Storage and 16% used Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. The majority of respondents had a disaster recovery plan. Of these, 79% used offsite storage while 21% had onsite storage.
Ricky Pereira, Dell Enterprise Manager, Pinnacle ICT, says, “It’s interesting that three-quarters of the respondents use a Cloud-as-a Service for their backup storage, this is a good step in their digital transformation journey to reduce the infrastructure and management of their IT resources. It also ties in with the responses on their disaster recovery plan and using offsite storage as part of their DR plan. It would be interesting to see how many respondents have ever tried to move their data from one cloud provider to another or even tried to bring their data back to their on-premise storage, as one of the biggest hidden costs from cloud providers is the amount you need to pay to get you own data back. Generally a company will just leave their data and continue to pay that cloud service provider even if they received poor service or were able to get a better deal at another service provider.”
There’s still a perception that flash is more expensive than spinning disks.
He adds, “We also saw from the responses that companies still like to keep to tried and-tested storage solutions, with almost half of the respondents still using Network Attached Storage and only 16% using new storage technologies like Hyper-Converged Infrastructure to provide their storage requirements.”
Flash storage usage
Nearly half of the survey’s respondents (48%) said their current storage drives comprised a hybrid solution (all-flash and spinning disks) while 32% used all flash storage and 20% relied on spinning disks. Asked to give their reasons for not considering all-flash storage, 54% of respondents cited cost, 18% said owing to legacy systems and 8% blamed lack of skills.
“Half of the respondents are not looking at an all-flash storage solution owing to the cost of flash drives over spinning disks, although pricing has come down on flash drives to the point where a 480GB flash drive is at the same price point of the 600GB spinning drive. The decision still boils down to performance over capacity,” says Pereira.
He goes on to say that with new technologies built into all-flash storage solutions, that can both compress and de-duplicate data, that 1GB of data that is purchased effectively becomes 3GB. “While this technology can also be used with spinning disks, the overhead on spinning disks would require more disks to achieve the same performance, up to a ratio of 17-1.
This will increase both the cost and the capacity of the storage solution, thereby making it less efficient.”
“There’s still a perception that flash is more expensive than spinning disks, which means that more education is required about all-flash storage solutions.”
He concludes by saying, “A lot of the survey’s respondents seem to have just started on their digital transformation journey. Even though half of the respondents updated their storage solutions in the past year, that next step is to get their storage solution to be more intelligent to be able to run autonomously, to be more adaptable to changing applications and technologies, and most of all to be data-centric so it can provide efficient storage without compromising performance or the ability to grow as the company’s data grows.”
About the survey
ITWeb, in partnership with Pinnacle and Dell Technologies, conducted a Storage Solutions survey during October/November 2021 to identify where companies are in their digital transformation journeys and how they’ll be modernising their storage and data protection infrastructure.
A total of 337 valid responses were captured - 60% of respondents were at exec or mid management level and 20% were at staff level.
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