Why Storage Is Crucial to Cloud Service Providers

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 […]

Written By: Gina Roos
Mar 18, 2016
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Cloud services

1 - Why Storage Is Crucial to Cloud Service ProvidersWhy 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.

2 - State of VirtualizationState of Virtualization

75% of CSPs have virtualized more than 80% of their applications.

3 - Lots of VMsLots of VMs

67% of CSPs have more than 1,000 virtual machines, and 84% have more than 250 VMs.

4 - Scaling SupportScaling 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.

5 - Top ServicesTop Services

The top services offered by CSPs are infrastructure as a service (84%), private cloud hosting (67%) and traditional managed services (48%).

6 - Hypervisor EnvironmentsHypervisor Environments

VMware vSphere (95%) dominates hypervisor environments followed by Microsoft Hyper-V (33%), OpenStack (31%), RHEV (11%) and Citrix XenServer (9%).

7 - OpenStack TractionOpenStack Traction

29% of CSPs plan to adopt OpenStack in less than one year. But 62% have no timeline for deployment or no current interest.

8 - Storage SpendingStorage 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.

9 - Top Buying CriteriaTop 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%).

10 - Pain PointsPain Points

The three big pain points in CSP data centers are poor performance, lack of reliability and cost (both CapEx and OpEx).

11 - Cloud Hosting Wish ListCloud 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%).

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