Beyond Silos: How Decision-Makers Rate Full-Stack Storage Infrastructure
While pure-play storage solutions have fared adequately, specific demands have revised the industry’s expectations from storage infrastructure.
- Aberdeen Strategy & Research surveyed decision-makers to uncover the limitations of pure-play storage and the advantages of a full-stack storage infrastructure.
- While pure-play storage solutions have fared adequately, specific demands have revised the industry’s expectations from storage infrastructure.
Beyond flashy words like hybrid and multicloud, IoT, artificial intelligence, or even your average relational database lies one of the most vital pieces of technology for enabling almost all technical operations — storage.
The storage infrastructure is responsible for ensuring the smooth running of the IT tech stack with which it is conjoined on almost all levels. Operations are determined by storage capacity, access to that capacity, and storage performance.
While pure-play storage solutions have fared adequately so far, skyrocketing data and analytics demands, resilience, cybersecurity, and the need for constant availability and high latency in an increasingly online world of emerging technologies have revised the industry’s expectations from storage infrastructure.
“With storage being the foundation of modernization and transformation, organizations need data storage solutions that boost integration and flexibility as their storage and business needs grow,” noted Jim Rapoza, VP & principal analyst for IT at Aberdeen Strategy & Research.
Aberdeen surveyed 301 U.S-based IT professionals responsible for making key decisions about storage infrastructure implementation in their respective companies. Here’s what the market research company found.
Limitations of Pure Play Storage Solutions
Here’s where pure play storage, i.e., one that doesn’t seamlessly integrate with cloud and other infrastructure, falls short:
- 54% of respondents said they need better support
- 50% of respondents said they need better cloud integration
- 46% of respondents said they need better ease of use
- 44% of respondents said they need better storage flexibility
- 43% of respondents said they need customization options
- 42% of respondents said they need more innovation
“While better support is the topmost requested improvement, the rest of the top six represent built-in limitations of dedicated storage solutions,” Aberdeen said. “The top example of this is the need for better integration, which 50% of users want and something that is a strength of full infrastructure stacks, where cloud, storage, compute, and networking work well together.”
Traditional storage solutions can also hold back organizations from leveraging data across multiple applications, not to mention in AI-based services. However, simply improving them may not necessarily solve the underlying issue.
Cybersecurity is the biggest challenge associated with upgrading traditional storage infra for 34% of respondents, followed by IT complexity (28%), reduced ROI from IT investments (25%), inability to meet higher storage needs (19%), and improved integration between cloud, network, server, and storage (17%).
See More: Unleashing Data Storage: From Hardware to the Cloud
How Can a Full-Stack Storage Infrastructure Help
Reliably agile, securely scalable storage and end-to-end IT management are a few key advantages of deploying a full-stack storage architecture.
Advantages of Using Full-Stack Storage Infra
Source: Aberdeen Strategy & Research
While the graph above may indicate a minuscule difference, Aberdeen found that Best-in-Class companies, i.e., those within the top 20% of critical metrics around reliability, security, and performance, are more likely to leverage full-stack storages.
“Best-in-class leaders are deploying storage architectures tied to full-stack IT infrastructure platforms that provide them with state-of-the-art data management and storage capabilities, integrated with cloud and AI, that enable fast performance, high availability, and data security,” Rapooza wrote. “In fact, looking at the Best-in-Class for storage capabilities, we see that they are 90% more likely than their competitors to utilize full-IT stack storage infrastructures.”
Full-stack IT modernization, complete with scalable and automated storage, is more likely to:
- Improve application performance (for 80% of respondent organizations)
- See higher management satisfaction (for 75%)
- have rapid applications and services deployment (for 55%)
- see less downtime (45%)
- Have improved security (15%)
Is your organization’s storage infrastructure future-ready? Share with us on LinkedIn, X, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
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