Survey Shows NAS Optimization as Top Choice for Overcoming Storage Performance Challenges in Virtualized Environments

PITTSBURGH, May 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Avere Systems today announced the results of a third-party survey that shows NAS Optimization as the top choice of solutions being considered by IT executives to meet the challenges to storage performance posed by virtualization.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090914/LA74693LOGO)

In the first half of 2012, Gatepoint Research invited more than 1,000 selected executives to participate in the "Impact of Virtualization on Storage Performance Optimization Trends" Pulse Report survey. Seventy percent of responders were employed by companies with annual revenues of at least $1.5 billion, forty-five percent work at director level or above with 23 percent at the VP or CxO level and 41 percent manage more than 500 TBs of storage capacity.

The survey asked what solutions they were considering implementing into their company's virtualization strategy to help overcome the needs of high-performance applications on their storage networks.  NAS Optimization was at the top of the list of respondents' choices for meeting the storage challenges posed by virtualization (26 percent) with NAS controller upgrades also at 26 percent. The least popular options considered were read-only caching (5%) and short-stroking hard drives (3%).

More than half of respondents will achieve 50 percent server virtualization by 2014, with 35% of organizations expecting to have more than two-thirds of servers virtualized in the same time period. In regards to desktop virtualization or VDI plans, less than one-fifth of the organizations surveyed expect to have 50 percent or more of their desktops virtualized by 2014, reflecting a lower VDI penetration rate in comparison to server virtualization.

"As the adoption of virtualization technologies steadily climbs, there is an ever-increasing need to implement proven solutions to overcome the performance challenges virtualization can create," said Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems.  "Our products have proven themselves in virtualized environments and are an ideal solution to handle the unique nature of virtualized workloads on storage, including random I/O patterns, write-centric traffic and frequent boot storms that can bring data access to a grinding halt. It's no wonder that executives polled in the Gatepoint Research survey indicated that NAS Optimization is their top choice to meet the storage challenges posed by virtualization. 

Among the survey's other findings:

• 91 percent of responders use networks that are a mix of NAS and SAN
• 49 percent report that more than half of their NAS capacity is NFS

For full summary results, interested parties can visit the Resources page at http://averesystems.com/Resources.aspx.

Additional findings will be shared by Avere Systems and Gatepoint Research in a 'not to miss' webinar on June 14th at 1:00pm eastern.  More information and registration is available on the Avere website at https://avereevents.webex.com/avereevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=668150463.

About Avere Systems
Avere Systems brings to the market NAS Optimization solutions designed specifically to scale performance and capacity separately and take advantage of new storage media using real-time tiering. Avere's FXT Series Edge filers allow organizations to achieve unlimited application performance scaling, free applications from the confines of the data center by eliminating latency and cut storage costs by more than half. Learn more at www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.

All trademarks, trade names and service marks referenced herein belong to their respective companies

SOURCE Avere Systems