Releases

posted on 07 March 2008 11:23

ONStor Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, today announced the results of a survey of 200 plus IT decision makers at last week’s VMWorld into current market perception of virtualisation.

This survey is the latest in a series of industry leading thought leadership surveys designed to identify market trends and follows off the back of a recent survey into the greening of the data centre.

The key finding is that 68% of respondents believe that storage virtualisation will improve their organisations’ storage availability. This finding appears to validate the trend that storage virtualisation is now firmly in the technology mainstream and no longer viewed as a niche solution.

The overwhelming majority of respondents (78%) stated that flexibility was critical in their decision making process when selecting a storage solution.

From the findings flexibility is now seen as a key factor driving storage virtualisation projects and viewed as just as important as both scalability and heterogeneity. This positions vendors such as ONStor with its massively scalable NAS solution at the forefront of the revolution currently underway in the market.

Other key findings include:

* Just over half (55%) of respondents believe that their current storage solutions will be able to scale to future needs.
* This means that in terms of market opportunity for potential vendors in the space some 45% of those questioned do not believe they have the right solutions in place now to future proof their investments.

* This figure demonstrates just how the market is overwhelmingly concerned with scalability issues and that scalable solutions are now a prerequisite for many IT departments.

* A massive 79% of those questioned are aware of how storage virtualisation can improve their fail-over processes.

* 61% of those questioned had not yet conducted a cost comparison of their existing storage solution against a NAS storage environment. Given the fact that 39% of the sample had already undertaken a project of this nature means that this is now moving up the value chain in IT departments.

"We know from conversations with those who attended this week’s VMWorld that data center power consumption amidst the exorbitant growth of data is a key concern for CIOs and other IT professionals," said Marcos Burnett, Country Manager, ONStor UK.

"What we find most interesting from this survey is how many IT departments aren't implementing solutions to address these challenges. However what is clear is that scalability is at the forefront of the minds of those responsible for the data centre,”

He continued: “Protecting legacy investments is also a critical business issue which came across loud and clear at this event. What is not clear is whether this is the direct result of increased cost pressures, the perceived global credit crunch affecting IT budgets or whether this is part of ongoing drives to improve TCO.”

"We also saw power and cooling consumption becoming a priority in the data centre," said Marcos Burnett. "ONStor supports two important ones including thin provisioning and intelligent tiering. Additionally, it is a great platform to drive file server consolidation, which is a key enabler for reducing power and cooling consumption."

According to a recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency, the IT industry consumed about 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, about 1.5 percent of the total electricity consumed in the United States, at a cost of about $4.5 billion, and power consumption in the industry could nearly double by 2011.

ONStor's NAS products offer file server consolidation, thin provisioning, and storage tiering, and are extremely energy efficient - all important factors for achieving a greener data center. Since ONStor's inception, the company has been at the forefront of designing and optimizing its hardware platform for energy efficiency. In fact, the company's clustered NAS system's power management units run on 160 watts - less than half of the industry standard.

About ONStor
ONStor provides clustered NAS solutions for both primary and value tier storage focusing on enterprise data centers and content rich organizations, giving customers the ability to cost-effectively manage the accelerating growth of unstructured data. ONStor’s award-winning solutions deliver flexible data management, protection, and file server consolidation for a new generation of data intensive applications through a combination of advanced technologies including virtualization and energy efficient design.

Proven at customer sites worldwide, ONStor's Pantera clustered NAS systems and Bobcat clustered NAS gateways offer the broadest choice of storage and enable customers to easily scale storage with the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). ONStor solutions are available through a global network of resellers and distribution partners. More information about ONStor can be found at www.onstor.com.