By Henry Baltazar

 Highlights from  451 Research’s Storage, Transformation 2021 survey indicate that spending is shifting away from capex toward opex spending models, with the rise of opex being driven by the growing importance of public cloud storage and the emergence of storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offerings, which offload maintenance and management burdens from organizations while providing consumption-based pricing. In this study, we continue to monitor the progress of key innovations, such as all-flash storage systems, and the rising impact of automation and AI/machine learning (ML)-enhanced management and monitoring tools.

The shift from capex to opex for IT infrastructure spending is creating challenges and opportunities for market disruption. Cloud storage continues to be the key beneficiary of this transition, although STaaS and other opex consumption models are allowing traditional storage players to come to market with offerings to offload management and maintenance burdens for their customers. All-flash storage continues to rise in importance for respondents, with 30% saying they are looking to use flash for all their primary and secondary storage needs in the future. Power and rack space consumption are key issues for the majority of respondents, and these factors should provide additional momentum for flash.

Management remains a major burden for organizations across on-premises and cloud environments. AI/ML enhanced management and monitoring tools continue to have an impact, and a majority of respondents are ready to spend a premium for these tools. Although we are a long way from fully autonomous remediation for all organizations (only 21% of respondents in this study), the majority of organizations have some automation in place and are already using it to handle some data migration and resource provisioning burdens.

Key takeaways from the survey

Funding for IT infrastructure systems and software continues to shift from capex to opex. Thirty-one per cent (31%) of respondents currently favor capex, while 26 per cent prefer opex spending. In the next three years, these preferences will flip, with 33 per cent favoring opex and 25 per cent favoring capex. The rise of STaaS is making it easier for organizations to adopt opex for their on-premises storage requirements. Greater flexibility (64%) and faster deployments (50%) were the top drivers for the shift to opex.

Funding for IT infrastructure systems and/or software

Most organizations are enforcing fiscal responsibility with chargeback and showback. Only 23 per cent of respondents are not allocating infrastructure resource consumption back to the business – considerably lower than last year, when 40 per cent did not track consumption. Fifty-nine percent (59%) are using chargeback, while 35 per cent are using showback to keep track of resource consumption. This continues to be an area of improvement for IT administrators that want to make their on-premises infrastructures more cloud-like.

The adoption of public cloud storage continues to rise. In last year’s survey, 62 per cent had public cloud storage in use, and this year that is up slightly at 63 per cent, with only 12 per cent not considering it in the future. The percentage of respondents using cloud block storage rose from 43 per cent to 55 per cent, on par with the adoption of cloud object storage at 55 per cent. This reflects the expanding use of public cloud storage beyond unstructured data workloads to more primary storage use cases.

Cloud NAS file service adoption continues to rise. The percentage of respondents using cloud NAS file services has increased from 44 per cent a year ago to 52 per cent in the latest study. Beyond the product development that Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform have added, major storage vendors such as Dell EMC and NetApp have made major efforts to make their mature storage technology available to the customers of hyperscalers.

Security and cost are leading concerns against transitioning to STaaS. Thirty-seven percent (37%) of respondents who are not using (and do not plan to use) STaaS cite security or compliance concerns as the primary reason. Thirty-two per cent (32%) say STaaS would cost more than running these storage management and maintenance tasks with in-house staff.

Why is your organization not planning on implementing STaaS?

The ability to trade in existing storage systems for STaaS and credits is important. Eighty-nine per cent (89%) of respondents say the ability to trade in existing storage for STaaS is important, with 61 per cent saying it is very important. Just 2 per cent say trade-ins are very unimportant.

Power efficiency and rack space consumption are important factors for deciding which storage systems to purchase. Fifty-six per cent (56%) of respondents say that power efficiency and rack space consumption are very important factors when considering storage purchases. This could accelerate the traction of all-flash storage, which is still more expensive than disk storage on a per-GB basis, but can provide rack space and power savings benefits.

One-third of respondents say they were negatively impacted by slow storage performance in the last three years. Thirty-three per cent (33%) say that either their on-premises storage systems or cloud storage services caused an issue. Among those affected, loss of employee productivity is a negative outcome for 48 per cent, while 38 per cent cite decreased customer satisfaction resulting from poor storage performance.

Container data protection and data management continue to be most important capabilities. Seventy-five per cent (75%) of respondents select data protection and data management as very important capabilities for lifecycle management. A unified management console is considered very important by 59 per cent, although only 1 per cent feel a unified console is not important at all.

The majority of respondents believe monitoring and management tools that use AI/ML are useful. Fifty-seven per cent (57%) of respondents strongly agree that AI/ML-enhanced tools simplify IT management at their organizations. Just more than half (52%) of respondents say they would be willing to pay a premium for tools with enhanced AI/ML capabilities.