A recent survey by two companies of enterprises with large NAS environments has shown a significant trend toward the adoption of NAS virtualization.
Coughlin Associates, a California technology and market research group and Peripheral Concepts, Inc. a storage and storage management consulting firm, recently announced the results of a two month-long survey focusing on NAS virtualization technology and trends.
The survey, which was paid for by a NAS gateway manufacturer, provides statistics on practices for NAS and NAS virtualization. Information is ranked by issues and needs and analyzes trends and acquisition intents.
NAS growth has outpaced most predictions, it found, and managing a high number of discrete file systems dealing with additions, changes and migrations has proved to be an impossible task.
“By creating a single logical view across multiple storage systems, NAS virtualization addresses the scaling, performance, and management problems that plague NAS scalability today,” said Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts. “Our survey shows an enormous interest in virtualization and a great awareness in the benefits of newer offerings”
Among the findings of the survey:
–Sites with over five NAS systems represent over 30 per cent of the population with NAS;
–Twenty percent of the sites with more than 1 TB of disk capacity use some kind of virtualization today and additional 24 per cent plan to acquire one in the coming year;
–Performance is ranked highest in the selection criteria of a NAS product, while scalability is at the top of the features required from a virtualization product;
–74 per cent want to leverage existing backup and recovery procedures;
–69 per cent need a NAS virtualization solution that does not require remounting of clients;
–79 per cent found NAS virtualization ease-of-deployment to be important, with 46 per cent seeing this as very or extremely important.
Parameters such as virtualization requirements, product selection criteria, and most valued management services associated with a NAS virtualization offer, are analyzed by disk capacity tiers, company revenue and industry. Nine industries were targeted in the report.
Included is a ranking of preferred NAS virtualization vendors including EMC Rainfinity, NetApp, ONStor, Exanet and others.
“As companies seek solutions to address their business needs, one thing stands clear: NAS virtualization provides strong advantages to organizations,” Jack Norris, vice-president of marketing for EMC Rainfinity, said in a press release from Coughlin Associates and Peripheral Concepts that announced the survey. “The momentum we are seeing to adopt this technology confirms what several studies have pointed out — major drivers for NAS virtualization are the need for non-disruptive data migration and data mobility — critical functionality that enterprises demand.”
“IT professionals face numerous challenges in storage management, yet we found little available research that explored their highest priority issues until now,” said Jon Toor, vice-president of marketing at ONStor, which commissioned the study. “This survey will help users better understand the value behind NAS virtualization as it provides survey-driven information that will allow technology users to benchmark key decision drivers.”
