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Only just over a quarter of businesses felt their current provider could meet their storage needs in the next three to five years

BOULDER, Colo. and SYDNEY, March 17, 2015 - SolidFire, ranked the #1 Solid-State Array, continues to confirm the increasingly critical role of storage within Australian enterprise IT. A survey of 309 Australian IT decision makers found that existing storage requirements, entrenched IT departments and legacy storage capabilities need to change in order for enterprises and service providers to deliver business-critical IT services and create new business opportunities.

The survey, conducted by PureProfile on behalf of SolidFire, found that 64 percent agreed it was important for their IT department to be innovative and bring new ideas to the organisation. Sixty-one percent agreed that storage innovation played a critical or important role in enabling their IT department to remain relevant and offer next-generation applications and services to the business.

Storage key to delivering new IT Services

The survey affirmed the increasingly important role that storage plays in the delivery of critical IT services. That role is set to increase over the next three to five years as 50 percent agreed that it will either be critical or play an increasingly important role in all of the services IT provides to their business.

The study also revealed hesitation from IT decision-makers as to whether or not their current storage infrastructure and vendors are able to deliver the solutions and functionality their businesses require:

• Fifty-five percent of respondents said ‘no’ or expressed doubt as to whether their current storage environment is set-up to support their needs over the next three to five years.
• Fifty-seven percent agreed their storage requirements would need to change over the coming years to enable the flexibility to innovate and deliver next-generation applications and services.
• Rather tellingly, only 26 percent believed their current provider would be able to meet their storage requirements in the next three to five years.

“The Australian storage market is headed for significant change over the next few years,” commented Steve Kelly, general manager, SolidFire Australia. “This rapid shift towards the deployment of all-flash infrastructures for all Tier-1 and Tier-2 workloads is one of the core reasons why SolidFire’s new Sydney office is at the center of our plans for growth globally. We feel that all-flash storage is playing an increasingly important role in allowing IT decision-makers to innovate and turn their IT departments into thriving profit centers that deliver true value to the business.”

Supporting Steve’s comments around change, survey results showed that storage environments are set to shift significantly over the next three to five years. The use of hard disk is expected to drop by over double while the use of all-flash is set to increase by double.

Storage Frustrations

When asked what frustrated them most about their current storage environment, IT decision makers said their top five issues were:

• Performance issues (33 percent)
• Management complexity (21 percent)
• Long deployment times (15 percent)
• Lack of automation (14 percent)
• Scaling challenges (13 percent)

Steve Kelly adds, “Having the right storage environment is critical to enabling enterprise IT to respond to the rapidly changing demands of their business. We expect to see a continued shift away from rigid spinning disk architectures towards flash platforms that not only provide greater performance but also enable enterprise IT with greater scale, predictability and automation than ever before. SolidFire is purpose built from the ground up to meet the pressing performance challenges of today’s applications, while providing all the functionality that enables enterprises to transition to their next generation data center.”