Survey shows: Most companies don't have big data plans

Most enterprise IT executives and data storage professionals do not perform large data analysis deployment plans in their organizations, according to a new data storage survey by market research firm Theinfopro.

56% of respondents said they had no plans to deploy large data analysis applications even by 2013. Of the 255 respondents, half of the respondents were data storage professionals, and the other half were IT managers, corporate vice presidents and CIOs.

Respondents who did not plan to perform Hadoop or other large data analysis software said that it would require a specific business situation, and that in most cases they did not consider that necessary, according to Marco Colt, Theinfopro's cloud computing practice director.

Plan to implement large data analysis

"For example, IT staff will need to consult with business units to see if these business units have the need to deploy large data applications, such as Hadoop, as a result of which no department is interested." "said Colt. "Without specific business requirements or applications, it becomes just a simple technology." ”

The companies that have launched big data analysis are often in the financial services and health care sectors where a lot of data can be used to boil down trends and best practices, says Colt.

The Theinfopro Company conducts a popular technology index survey every year, asking hundreds of IT pros about their technical planning issues. The company's latest investigative activity was conducted from August 2011 to April this year.

Unsurprisingly, respondents chose server virtualization technology as the main driver of enterprise capacity growth, and Fibre Channel Sans are the primary targets of enterprise data storage. 67% per cent of respondents said they were connecting 80% to 100% of production servers to Fibre Channel Sans.

Drive capacity Growth

Last year, however, the Fibre Channel hard drive market took a hit as SAS, SSD and SATA drives gradually dominate the enterprise.

If asked what new disk storage devices were purchased in 2011, 48% per cent of respondents said they had purchased Fibre Channel drives, 31% for SATA drives and 19% for sas,2% SSD solid-state hard drives. However, when asked about the equipment that these companies purchased this year, 41% per cent said they had purchased SAS drives, 35% SSD solid-state drives, 23% SATA drives and 11% as Fibre Channel.

Drive type purchased by the enterprise in 2011

The survey found that the number of companies planning to deploy SSD technology jumped from 7% last year to 37% this year.

"This is a very big leap, after all, these companies have not planned to use SSD solid-state drives before." This percentage fell from 42% to 23%. "Kurt said.

Mixed arrays and SSD solid-state drives

Most enterprise data centers use a hybrid array of SSD solid-state drives and rotating disks, while the new data centers are full of solid-state arrays and server SSD solid-state drives. EMC is the first supplier of solid state hybrid arrays, well ahead of competitors. Following EMC are NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems (Hitachi), IBM, HP, Oracle and Dell.

Which vendor's products are using a hybrid array solid-state drive?

When asked which suppliers provided solid-state storage servers, Fusion-io topped the list, followed by IBM, HP, Oracle, Dell and Seagate. EMC is nineth on the list, lagging behind NetApp.

The survey showed that the top solid suppliers were: Fusion-io, Purestorage, Nimbusdata, Nimblestorage, Gridironsystems and Kove. In addition to producing all DRAM equipment, Kove also sells interface flash cards and all-flash arrays or appliances.

The preferred supplier of solid state servers is Fusion-io, followed by IBM, HP, Oracle and Dell. Seagate ranked sixth.

When asked if they would implement the All-flash array, 7% of respondents said they were already using the technology, while 86% per cent said there were no plans to implement. In addition, 4% of respondents said they planned to buy the All-flash array, but should be in the next six to 18 months time. 2% of respondents said they would implement the plan after 18 months.

Matt Wotters, an architect of the company's infrastructure for the Mitsubishi Power Systems Americas Branch, was not involved in Theinfopro's investigation. But he said his company installed a all-flash array from Nimbusstorage last December to address the I/O slowdown in their enterprise's SAP environment.

Wotters initially tried to put the second set of processors into all of his SAP servers, upgrading the memory to its maximum capacity, but the problem persisted. He finally went back to the TB size of the SAP database and the primary storage load data to shrink the performance problem, which was adopted at the time by an HP Eva array. Increasing the cost of SSD to Eva is more expensive than buying all-flash arrays, Wotters said.

The Nimbus Company's array supports 2TB of storage capacity, costing about 40000 dollars, he said.

Nimbus's superior fast-flash storage array eliminates the bottleneck of the database and also cuts back the time from four hours on Eva to a new flash array of 15 minutes.

"So far, I have been very satisfied with the performance." Not a single fault. "he said. I think of an array in the morning, the afternoon can be online. It's as simple as that. ”

Wotters environment Isolation Flash storage to an application: SAP. However, those involved in the Theinfopro company survey found that the ability to automatically tier data, or migrate data between individual drive types in the array, became the hottest storage technology.

Automatic layering moves data between high-performance solid-state drives, or moves from hard disks to high-capacity, low performance disks as data access frequency decreases.

At present, all major vendors are selling automated tiering technology, instead of backup data restoration and data deduplication technology, occupy the "hot technology" of the top spot, according to Theinfopro's survey.

In addition, respondents said they had tightened it budgets this year. Last year, 46% of people said their budget would increase. Only 40% said they were looking forward to more IT budgets this year.

IT professionals in midsize enterprises say they expect the IT budget to be the most austerity period, with only 36% per cent of respondents saying their business plans to increase IT spending, down 47% per cent year-on-year.

(Editor: Technology)