DataCorp Software recently released its State of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) survey for 2015 which looked at the impact of Software-Defined-Storage (SDS) on businesses globally.

The survey analyzed “the expectations and experiences of 477 IT professionals that are currently using or evaluating SDS technology to solve critical data storage challenges. The results yield surprising insights from a cross-section of industries over a wide range of workloads.”

Key findings of the survey included:

• 52% of respondents expect that SDS will extend the life of existing storage assets and future-proof the storage infrastructure to absorb new technologies.

• Almost half of the respondents believe SDS helps to avoid hardware lock-in from storage manufacturers and lower hardware costs by allowing them source from several storage manufacturers.

• The ability to add storage capacity without business disruption was identified as the primary reason for choosing storage virtualization software (52%). Supporting synchronous mirroring and metro clusters for high availability to ensure business continuity and asynchronous data replication for remote site disaster recovery were also high on the list.

• More than 60% of respondents experienced performance degradation or the inability to meet performance after virtualizing server workloads. When asked what the typical causes of performance problems are, 61% of respondents blame slow applications, and 46% cite legacy storage devices as the culprit, while 22% attributed slowdowns to incompatible storage equipment.

• Nearly half (45%) of respondents are evaluating the deployment of hyper-converged systems to increase performance for specific applications; increase availability and simplify management for remote sites; or to consolidate compute, networking, and storage.

• Many of the organizations surveyed (50%) have not budgeted for the heavily hyped technologies such as Big Data, Object Storage, Public Cloud Storage and OpenStack in 2015 but instead are investing in SDS and storage virtualization.

• 53% of respondents indicated that they currently have less than 10 percent of capacity assigned to flash storage while 9% of respondents indicated that that flash makes up greater than 40% of their storage capacity.

• Human errors (61%) were the most significant factor behind application and data centre outages thus driving the need for greater automation as well as the complexity which accompanies data growth and diversity.

The clear benefit of SDS technology lays in the ability for business enterprise to start where it is and move forward to a virtual storage environment without requiring it to make expensive changes to its current storage infrastructure along the way.