Taking a Measured Approach to Software-Defined Storage

Although there's no doubt that a major transformation in how storage is managed is under way, the pace at which that shift is occurring is paramount to the channel. A global survey of 388 IT professionals conducted by DataCore Software, a provider of storage management software, finds significant interest in being able to leverage software-defined storage (SDS) to more easily manage multiple classes of storage, but the need to master new storage management tools is the top challenge slowing those efforts. In general, the survey makes it clear that the ability to dynamically expand storage capacity on demand is the primary factor driving interest in SDS. The need to manage flash memory as part of an SDS strategy, however, is not as much of a driving factor, with more than 60 percent of the IT professionals surveyed saying they have less than 10 percent of their data residing in flash storage. All in all, the DataCore survey suggests that IT organizations that have already adopted virtualization are better candidates for adopting SDS than customers with less mature approaches to managing IT.