Cloud services
Why Storage Is Crucial to Cloud Service Providers
The lion’s share of CSPs have virtualized more than 80% of their environments, and almost a third spend more than 10% of their revenue on storage.
State of Virtualization
75% of CSPs have virtualized more than 80% of their applications.
Lots of VMs
67% of CSPs have more than 1,000 virtual machines, and 84% have more than 250 VMs.
Scaling Support
The scale of VMs is not limited to the largest CSPs; 38% of respondents with revenue below $50 million said their infrastructure needs to support more than 1,000 VMs.
Top Services
The top services offered by CSPs are infrastructure as a service (84%), private cloud hosting (67%) and traditional managed services (48%).
Hypervisor Environments
VMware vSphere (95%) dominates hypervisor environments followed by Microsoft Hyper-V (33%), OpenStack (31%), RHEV (11%) and Citrix XenServer (9%).
OpenStack Traction
29% of CSPs plan to adopt OpenStack in less than one year. But 62% have no timeline for deployment or no current interest.
Storage Spending
30% of CSPs spend more than 10% of their revenue on storage. Another 46% spend 5% to 10%, and 23% spend less than 5%. This is in comparison to typically 2% to 3% for enterprises.
Top Buying Criteria
The top five criteria that CSPs use to evaluate storage are performance (86%), reliability/availability/serviceability (69%), cost (58%), manageability (41%) and scalability (38%).
Pain Points
The three big pain points in CSP data centers are poor performance, lack of reliability and cost (both CapEx and OpEx).
Cloud Hosting Wish List
The top features requested are cloud hosting features, such as multitenancy and data security (61%), followed by automation (46%), quality of service (41%), storage operations at VM-level (41%) and pay-as-you-go option/subscription pricing (39%).