ActualTech Media, in partnership with Atlantis Computing, released its Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCIS) and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) 2016 Survey to provide insight on how IT organisations are building modern data centres in 2016 and beyond. The survey, conducted with more than 1,267 data centre leaders from 53 countries, revealed that 71 per cent either already use or are considering adoption of HCIS or SDS.
“There is a lot of confusion and hype in the fast changing HCIS and SDS markets and it is critical to gather data about real-world usage,” explained Scott D. Lowe, partner and co-founder of ActualTech Media. “We believe this is the largest and most detailed account of adoption, buying criteria and use cases for HCIS and SDS. The new report provides IT organisations with critical insights on how HCIS and SDS technologies are being used, actual experiences from the field and the future plans of data centre leaders from around the world.”
Why are Organisations Adopting SDS and HCI?
While 75 per cent or organisations currently use disk-based storage, only 44 per cent have it as part of their future infrastructure plans. Further, 19 per cent of organisations expect to decommission disk-based SAN entirely in favour of either HCIS or SDS. When asked about their key decision criteria for adoption of SDS and HCIS, IT organisations cited performance (72 per cent), high availability (68 per cent) and cost (68 per cent) as top requirements.
Continued data growth was also a key driver for change, with median annual data growth rates of 20 per cent reported by survey respondents. Most IT organisations must support these growth rates with flat or decreasing budgets, making the efficiency of data centre infrastructure increasingly important for businesses.
“The ActualTech Media survey provides great perspective on the HCIS and SDS markets with results and analyses that simply have not been available in this rapidly growing and evolving category,” said Seth Knox, vice president of product marketing at Atlantis. “For the first time, we have access to quantitative data on hypervisor trends, high availability configuration, evaluation criteria, software versus hardware HCIS preferences and many other dynamics that will shape the HCIS and SDS markets in 2016.”