When it comes to the challenges of storage performance posed by virtualisation, IT executives are turning to network attached storage (NAS) optimisation for solutions.
According to research carried out earlier this year by Gatepoint Research among over 1,000 top level IT people and C suite officers in large enterprise, 91% of respondents use networks that are a mix of NAS and storage area networks (SAN).
The survey asked what solutions were being considered to help overcome the needs of high-performance applications on their virtualised storage networks. Of the organisations represented, 41% manage more than 500 TBs of storage capacity.
NAS optimisation was at the top of the list of respondents’ choices for meeting the storage challenges posed by virtualisation (26%), with NAS controller upgrades scoring similarly. The least popular options considered were read-only caching (5%) and short-stroking hard drives (3%).
More than half of respondents said that they will achieve 50% server virtualisation by 2014, with 35% of organisations expecting to have more than two-thirds of servers virtualised in the same time period. With regard to desktop virtualisation or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) plans, less than one-fifth of the organisations surveyed expect to have 50% or more of their desktops virtualised by 2014, reflecting a lower VDI penetration rate in comparison to server virtualisation, commented the researchers.
The majority of respondents (84%) have high performance storage requirements, with half reporting that VMware, Oracle and financial analytics are the main sources of performance demand.
The breakdown of SAN and NAS in virtualised storage environments shows that SAN has the greater footprint with 58% reporting that they have 50 to 75% SAN. Some 42% of respondents have less than 25% of their virtualised storage as NAS, with 29% reporting that they have 20-50% as NAS.
With a clear requirement to improve performance to meet increasing demand from applications, storage management and optimisation to support virtualisation and cloud strategies are becoming ever more important.
The TechFire series of events will tackle this topic in its session entitled "Can your storage bear the weight of a cloud?" on Tuesday 29 May at the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, with a selection of speakers from ComputerScope, DNM Technology and Dell.
To register for this free event and for more information see www.techfire.ie
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers