70% of companies to move to software-defined storage within 12 months

A recent study released by enterprise open source infrastructure solution provider, SUSE, has made some interesting findings.

It appears traditional enterprise storage strategies aren't keeping up with the exponential growth of business, as they are now under the microscope in 70 percent of IT organisations.

The study found that the vast majority of companies have revised their storage approach and strategy over the last year. This has been largely due to frustrations with storage costs, performance, complexity and fragmentation of existing solutions.

The bulk of these companies are looking at software-defined storage to help bridge the gap.

The majority of respondents currently have hybrid flash - disk (62 percent) or disk-based systems (61 percent) in place, with most experiencing the following common challenges:

• High costs – 80 percent reported costly operations, with 92 percent worries about mounting storage costs as capacity requirements grow
• Performance concerns – 73 percent of senior IT staff said they were frustrated with the performance of their existing storage solution, with 92 percent concerned it would hamper their digital transformation initiatives
• Growing complexity and fragmentation – 71 percent said their system was highly complex and fragmented, and as a result the most commonly reported priority over the next 12 was to simplify their storage approach

SUSE vice president of solution strategy, Joseph George says that in today's economy, every company is essentially a data storage company – they're archiving email, distributing large video files, and are now starting to store petabytes of data, often for years due to record retention policies and regulatory requirements.

"Storage is at an inflection point where traditional storage approaches are being reevaluated in light of growing data demands and more scalable, affordable options," says George.

"Fortunately, there is a steady stream of innovation coming from the open source community to help enterprises ease cost and implementation frustrations. These survey results underscore the need for companies to examine a more flexible approach to meeting the ever-growing need for data storage without breaking the bank.