Data Storage Upgrades Prove Disruptive to SMBs

As many as 71 percent of the survey respondents reported that they were adding storage and capacity every 6 to 12 months.

Managing the storage lifecycle due to staggering data growth is a significant challenge for IT administrators, according to a study on the top IT pain points impacting today’s midmarket enterprises from software-defined storage solutions specialist Gridstore.

The survey indicated that during a major storage upgrade more than half (55 percent) of midmarket enterprises experienced business- and end-user disruption, while 32 percent experienced failed upgrade process where migrations didn’t complete, and 9 percent lost data or access to data during the migration.

When asked what their top challenges are today, the survey respondents commented that keeping it cost effective, responsive and adequate for growing businesses needs, backing up vast amounts of data, catching up with the growth of data and the expense to do that and hitting capacity limits too quickly were their top concerns.

“Capacity is at the core of any storage system. When you look to scale the storage capacity of your business, this is the first place to start. Making your environment more efficient in order to maximize capacity is critical,” the report said. “The key is to maintain capacity efficiency without compromising performance.”

As many as 71 percent of the survey respondents reported that they were adding storage and capacity every 6 to 12 months. Results indicated the majority (63 percent) of those surveyed had a storage environment of between 50TB and 250TB in capacity. When asked respondents how often they add capacity to their environment, 38 percent indicated every six months.

“Midsized enterprises are feeling the pain of trying to keep up with staggering amounts of data and are trying to solve the problem with monolithic storage solutions that don’t meet their business requirements,” Gridstore CEO Kelly Murphy said in a statement. “Organizations are forced to purchase expensive storage every 6 to 12 months, adding complexity and risk that is disruptive to their business. The Grid gives organizations a simple building-block approach to solving their storage dilemma, allowing them to achieve the capacity and performance they need–at the time they need it–without costly over provisioning or risky forklift upgrades.”

Data proliferation is impacting businesses of all sizes, yet the number of IT professionals available to manage all that data will only grow by 1.5 times today's levels—more than 1.8 zettabytes of data was created last year in the form of files, email and video and will account for 90 percent of all data created in the next decade, according to a recent report from IT research firm IDC.