EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW. Storage. Workloads and Key Projects 2018, Quarterly Advisory Report EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW. Storage: Workloads and Key Projects, 2018

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1 Storage Workloads and Key Projects 2018, Quarterly Advisory Report

2 Voice of the Enterprise: Storage Voice of the Enterprise: Storage Survey Results and Analysis Workloads and Key Projects provides you with actionable data and insight to understand the key dynamics driving the storage market. Combining 451 Research s industry-leading analysis with an extensive network of senior IT professionals, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage tracks the disruption occurring in the market and exposes the major opportunities for enterprises, IT vendors, suppliers and investors. Delivered quarterly, this research provides comprehensive, surveydriven analyst reports with customizable data deliverables. The Workloads and Key Projects 2018 survey wave was completed from January through April The survey represents approximately 600 total completes from pre-qualified IT decision-makers primarily based in North America and Europe. Markets covered include all-flash arrays, hyperconverged infrastructure and container storage. In addition to regular quarterly topics, this survey focuses on workloads and key projects, and the requirements to run them. Voice of the Enterprise: Storage Workloads and Key Projects, 2018 includes: Approximately 600 quarterly web-based surveys with IT end-user decision-makers on a worldwide basis. 16 individual interviews quarterly with leading-edge senior IT executives, providing a narrative view of the market. Sampling that is representative of small, midsize and large enterprises in private and public sectors. Data-driven deliverables for fast access and ability to perform segmentation work. 2

3 Summary of Findings Workload challenges and placement. A substantial portion of respondents (35%) will require upgrades to meet current and future needs. Performance, stability and cost are leading factors which infrastructure professionals are struggling to overcome in their current IT environments. These challenges will only become more difficult to handle with the emergence of new workload types such as containers, artificial intelligence and blockchain, which are highly distributed in nature and will have significant performance demands as they grow in relevance. All-flash arrays (AFAs): the future is now. The transition from primarily disk-based storage to AFAs has been long and arduous, with many incumbent vendors dragging their heels along the way. Though a majority of respondents still do not have AFAs in use, only 26% of respondents do not have the technology in their immediate plans, and most established storage players are reporting robust sales for their AFA offerings. Beyond database and data warehouse deployments, even mainstream applications such as are heading for AFAs, suggesting that widespread adoption is well under way. HCI edging into the datacenter and cloud. HCI continues to rise in prominence, with only 27% of respondents claiming they have no plans to deploy it. Beyond core infrastructure refresh and upgrades, HCI figures prominently in organizations private and hybrid cloud strategies. Containers are driving great expectations. Persistent storage for containers is definitely a hot-button topic this year, but based on our research findings, expectations for containers for resiliency and resource provisioning acceleration are a bit ahead of market reality. While 47% of respondents believe containers will deliver improved resiliency over VMs, the majority of deployments at present are run within VMs (not on bare metal). This could change quickly, given that container adoption is in its early days, with only 19% of respondents claiming to have it in use today. 3

4 The 451 Take Changes in applications and workload requirements have traditionally driven the adoption of new technologies in on-premises environments to meet those needs. In this survey, 35% of respondents claim that their infrastructures are not adequate to meet either current or future requirements. With the rise of public cloud as an alternative, infrastructure professionals are under pressure to improve their delivery of IT resources across a number of different areas. Speed/performance is the top category where on-premises infrastructures require improvements (46% of respondents). With the rise of all-flash arrays and the upcoming emergence of storage-class memories, this should become a less important issue in future years for both on-premises and public cloud environments. A number of organizations (34% of respondents) are also seeking out self-service infrastructures and application provisioning similar to that found in public clouds. While there is no easy button to upgrade traditional architectures to meet this demand, HCI and containers will likely have major roles in this transition as organizations attempt to create their own on-premises implementations for handling cloud-native workloads. Thirty-three percent of respondents believe containers will allow workloads that took an entire day to be provisioned to be deployed in hours. Setting up and running workloads is not where the story ends. For more and more infrastructure professionals, recovery requirements for organizations are stringent even for non-critical environments such as test/dev, based on our findings. As customer requirements for resiliency and reduced (if any) data loss continue to rise, organizations will be forced to fortify their on-premises environments while also weighing the potential for leveraging the public cloud as their designated recovery site. 4

5 Appendix: Respondent Demographics

6 Region Number of Employees Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Workloads and Key Projects

7 Industry Job Title Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Workloads and Key Projects

8 Revenue Age of Company Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Workloads and Key Projects

9 New Tech Adoption All Respondents Digital Transformation All Respondents Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Workloads and Key Projects

10 About the Author Henry Baltazar Research Vice President, Infrastructure Henry Baltazar is a Research Director for the Storage Channel at 451 Research. Henry returned to 451 Research after spending nearly three years at Forrester Research as a senior analyst serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals and advising Forrester clients on datacenter infrastructure technologies. Henry has evaluated and tested storage hardware and software offerings for more than 15 years as an industry analyst and as a journalist. Prior to 451 Research and Forrester, Henry spent nearly nine years working as a technical analyst for eweek Labs, where he covered storage, server hardware and network operating systems. At eweek Labs, he initiated the testing coverage of various technologies, including data replication, clustering, virtual tape libraries, storage virtualization, SAN management, NAS, iscsi and archiving. In addition, Henry was a member of eweek's editorial board and provided content for the magazine's enterprise storage blog. Henry has been widely quoted in the press, including such media outlets as Silicon Valley Business Journal, Computerworld and SearchStorage.com. Henry holds a BA in environmental sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. 10

11 About the Author Liam Rogers Senior Research Associate, Storage As a Senior Research Associate in 451 Research s Storage Channel, Liam Rogers covers technology and business-model innovation across the enterprise storage landscape spanning primary storage systems and software, backup and recovery, archiving, cloud storage services, cloud-enabling storage technologies and storage management. This includes markets such as data management, hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined storage. liam.rogers@451research.com He holds a BA in English with a minor in Business Administration from Shenandoah University. He also has an MA in Professional Writing and Rhetoric from George Mason University, where he received an award for Outstanding Graduate Student in Writing and 11

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