Survey Shows Managing Growth, Costs Top Storage Environment Challenges

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Avere Systems, the company setting new performance benchmarks with its Demand-Driven Storage™ solutions, today announced the results of a third-party survey of IT executives.  The survey clearly shows rapid increases in data and general growth in business are the major drivers for building higher performance storage networks.

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Between July 14 and August 10, 2010, Gatepoint Research invited more than 1,000 select executives to participate in the Next Generation Storage Performance survey, which queried them as to their top storage environment challenges. The top responses were managing storage growth (77 percent) and managing costs (72 percent).  In addition, more than two-thirds of responders consider performance scaling decisively important and is accomplished mainly by short-stroking HDDs, adding more HDDs and NAS controller upgrades.

"It's no surprise that the majority of those surveyed felt that storage growth and the cost of maintaining data are major priorities. Power and space resources continue to rise by throwing more disks at the problem in an attempt to keep up with performance demand, illustrating that traditional disk-based NAS filers have become very inefficient in matching performance and capacity requirements," said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems.  "Rather than over-provisioning storage capacity for modest gains in application performance – a choice that requires ever-increasing amounts of power and limited data center space – companies should instead investigate tiered NAS solutions such as the Avere FXT Series, which provides the ability to scale performance with the application and provide a 5:1 reduction in disks, power and rackspace."

Among the survey's other findings:

• 90 percent of responders have mixed NAS-SAN network storage
• 74 percent manage more than 100 TBs of storage capacity
• Oracle and VMware are the major sources of performance demand
• Over half of respondents consider EMC a strategic storage vendor

Candidates invited to participate in the Next Generation Storage Performance survey were invited via email with each agreeing to participate voluntarily.  Seventy-five percent of responders were employed by companies having annual revenues of $1 billion or more; 43 percent with $10 billion or more.  Fifty-nine percent of responders work at the director level or above.  For full summary results, interested parties can visit http://www.averesystems.com

About Avere Systems' FXT Series

The Avere FXT Series contains both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media to optimize performance without compromises on all types of workloads. Reads, writes and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere's unique approach to dynamic tiering. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliances monitor access frequency patterns and workload type and manage data placement on multiple internal tiers to increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster and minimize requests to the mass storage server. Movement of data occurs in real-time – not in hours or days – and occurs at the file-level or even block-level with a file. All of this is done automatically by the system – there are no complex policies to configure or update.

About Avere Systems

Avere provides Demand-Driven Storage solutions that dynamically organize data in response to business demand. The Avere FXT Series enables faster application performance at dramatically lower cost by intelligently moving active data between traditional storage devices and FXT appliances. In benchmark SPECsfs2008 testing the FXT Series was shown to provide the highest performance and most efficient scaling with lowest cost vs. other disk-based solutions.  Installed at leading entertainment, life science and energy companies, to name a few, the FXT Series, which can be clustered for maximum scalability, tiers data on SSD and HDD media and enables a 5:1 reduction in disks, power, and rack space.   Learn more at www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.

SOURCE Avere Systems