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Storage virtualisation market 2008
31/07/08
As the
information explosion continues to drive businesses into the
virtualised world, storage virtualisation continues to deliver real
world business benefits to adopters. Recent independent surveys
conducted in both the United States and Europe by leading provider
of clustered NAS solutions for enterprises and content rich
organisations, ONStor indicate that the majority of businesses
surveyed in both regions believe that their existing storage
solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years.
While it has
been widely recognised that storage virtualisation is the best way
to provide a flexible, scalable and highly available storage
environment, only 27% of European respondents are actually
implementing storage virtualisation today as compared with 35% in
the US.
73% of US
respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised
server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering
deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.
In the US, 45%
of businesses surveyed stated that they would realise operational
cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of storage
adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.
Bob Miller,
ONStor CEO, states that effective storage virtualisation delivers
real business value, such as simplified management, improved
utilisation and painless migration, and offers high-end features to
customers.
"Customers
already adopting a virtualised storage strategy are fast realising
the benefits of reduced operational costs and improved data
availability," said Miller.
Other
significant results from the survey include:
* 59% of
respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing
storage solution will be able to scale for only one to two years;
way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%
* Half of US
respondents believe that simplifying management is the most
important consideration when choosing a storage virtualisation
solution. In Europe the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.
* 45% of US
respondents consider 20-40% operational cost savings to be the
number one motivation to switch from their current file storage
solution to virtualised storage. In Europe the figure was comparable
at 48%.
Customers are
often faced with insurmountable amounts of data stored on a variety
of disparate storage resources which highlights the need for a
centralised, virtualised storage solution which is easy to manage.
These solutions allow storage administrators to identify, provision
and manage disparate storage as a single aggregated resource.
Nick Gibson, editor
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