Why Storage Is Crucial to Cloud Service Providers

A majority of cloud service providers (CSPs) have virtualized more than 80 percent of their environments, and nearly a third spend more than 10 percent of their revenue on storage, according to a survey 78 CSPs that was conducted by Tintri, a provider of VM-aware storage. This means selecting the right storage solution becomes an important decision in terms of cost, and how CSPs deliver differentiated services to customers in a very competitive cloud services market. One of the key ways CSPs can grow their businesses is through differentiated services, which garners higher margins and profits. Storage products for virtualized environments need to handle scale without performance degradation. However, CSPs cite storage performance as a top challenge. Another pain point—manageability—wasn't selected as one of the top three purchasing criteria for storage, but it should be, particularly for CSPs that have virtualized more than 50 percent of their data centers' workloads, according to Tintri. Poor virtual machine (VM) manageability affects storage performance and, thus, a CSP's bottom line. Here are 10 survey highlights to benchmark your company against other CSPs.