Survey Spotlights Top 5 Data Storage Pain Points
An IT industry analyst article published by Enterprise Storage Forum.
by Mike Matchett,
The Enterprise Storage Forum survey uncovered the biggest challenges storage professionals have with their existing storage infrastructure: aging gear, lack of capacity, high operations cost, security, maintenance burden. We’ll discuss which storage technologies available or coming soon might serve to ease those pain points.
Data storage has been around as long as computing, but based on the Enterprise Storage Forum survey, we have yet to solve all the problems. Entitled Data Storage Trends 2018, the survey reveals that storage professionals face no lack of serious concerns.
One of the interesting charts that jumped out at me is about the biggest challenge in operating current storage infrastructure. In essence, this is the “select your biggest pain” question. Let’s dive in.
Top Five Data Storage Challenges
Why are these ever-present data storage challenges? Why haven’t storage vendors researched technologies and nailed down solutions to solve them? This chart illustrates the leading pain points; we’ll look at the top five:
1. Aging gear: Of course, no matter when you invest in new equipment, it starts aging immediately. And once deployed, storage, and the data stored on it tends to sit in the data center until it reaches some arbitrary vendor end-of-life (EOL) stage. With working storage the motto tends to be – “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it!”
Still, once something like storage is deployed, the capex is a sunk cost. Aging storage should probably be replaced long before full obsolescence comes along; significant attribute improvements are likely available on the market at any large storage’s “half-life.” These include better performance and agility, cheaper operating costs and upgrades, increased capacity and new features.
Here, I can’t blame storage vendors for lack of improved storage offerings. From flash engineered designs to software-defined agility, the storage landscape is full of opportunistic (and large ROI) “refresh” solutions. Proactive storage managers might think to replace their storage “ahead of time” as the scales tip in favor of new solutions, rather than sit back and wait for the traditional “five year” accounting-based storage refresh cycle.
2. Lack of Storage Capacity: Yes, data is still growing. In fact, data growth can be non-linear, which makes it hard to plan ahead. Unable to keep up with capacity demand, many organizations now rely on that elastic storage provider, cloud, hybrid cloud or even multi-cloud storage services – which can get pricey!
We may be doomed to suffer this pain point forever, but some newer storage technologies are being designed to scale-out “for a long time” with linear performance…(read the complete as-published article there)