Two Thirds Of Firms Think Storage Cost Is Biggest Data Centre Problem

Despite the ever decreasing cost of storage, a majority of firms reckon price is still their major data centre storage pain point.

Nearly three quarters of respondents to Tech Pro Research’s data storage report identified cost as a problem in the data centre, ahead of the needs for surging capacity, performance optimisation, and capacity optimisation.

“Despite the discussions about burgeoning data and the need to get strategic about storage, storage is still viewed in enterprises as a commodity asset,” said Tech Pro Research. “It therefore comes as no surprise that the major pain point for 68 percent of those surveyed is cost of storage.”

But the report predicted that as new forms of storage such as all-flash and cache memory become more affordable and widespread in the data centre, the revenue opportunities they offer customers will allow them to forget their storage cost woes.

“When companies start linking revenues to the number of transactions per second that computers can process, and they see that higher cost storage media can resolve transaction bottlenecks and speed transaction (and revenue) processing, adopting these new storage media and optimising storage for performance become more attractive,” said the report.

Early days

However, for the average firm, the days of capitalising on the explosion of data in the data centre are still on the horizon. According to the report, 30 percent of firms are still not feeling any impact from Big Data on their storage capacity in the data centre, with 32 percent believing there is a “moderate” impact.

“It is still too early for companies to feel the impact of big data,” said Tech Pro Research. “But they will as the Internet of Things (IoT), the tracking of web-based events, and data from machines and sensors become more integral pieces for operational decision making and work processes.”

The report also highlighted that, despite private companies being happy to store their unstructured data in public cloud services, 63 percent do not use public cloud at all.

“Until and unless storage managers and business executives feel that their data is secure and in conformance with governance standards that meet or exceed their own, there will be hesitance to store business data in a public cloud,” said Tech Pro Research. Interestingly, 21 percent of respondents use public cloud services for backup purposes, and 19 percent use public cloud services for application data.

AWS and Azure – neck and neck

But when it did come to private firms using public cloud, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure were neck and neck, both being used by 32 percent of research respondents respectively.

“While public cloud storage is still not a preferred company storage deployment strategy, Amazon’s reputation in effectively running its own cloud infrastructure for its business and Microsoft’s established presence as a hardware, software, networking and applications provider in the small to medium sized company space, help to make both companies forerunners in public cloud storage,” said the report.

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