News
Avere Systems’ NAS Audit reveals that US storage pros hoard more data than European counterparts
October 2012 by Avere Systems
Avere Systems has discovered that the US may appear to be the biggest data hoarders and Europeans have more catching up to do when it comes to considering solutions for NAS optimization.
The NAS optimization company has been comparing storage attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic through the results of two independently-sourced surveys: the US-based Pulse Report and the European NAS Audit.
One of the biggest differences discovered was in the amount of data managed. In the United States over 41% of the respondents managed over 500TB of storage whereas the Europeans appear to be lagging behind with only 20% managing large capacity arrays. This is reflected in the number of NAS-only systems. The American sample only had 9% using nothing but NAS while the figure was a more substantial 27% in Europe though there was a further 23% using mixed NAS and SAN environments.
With its NAS Optimization product in mind, Avere was more interested in digging down into the needs of the user community. The majority of companies in each sample were running applications that required high performance or suffered from unpredictable file access. Although there was agreement that NAS controller upgrades were a possible way to meet these challenges, the US were equally impressed with NAS optimization while in Europe it was the fifth choice behind adding more disks, implementing solid-state drive arrays (SSDs) and switching to SAN.
“The US has a better understanding of the value that NAS optimization can offer to overcome performance issues. It is Avere’s mission to take the lessons learned in the US and share those with the European storage professionals,” commented Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems. She continued: “SNW Europe is an ideal forum for this and my presentation on “When IT worlds collide: SSD, Virtualization and Cloud” will cover much of the best practice and real world experience Avere has seen in these areas.”
About the Avere Systems NAS Audit
The Avere Systems NAS Audit was conducted online during August and early September 2012. 114 storage professionals from across EMEA completed the survey. These storage professionals worked across a variety of sectors including: finance, telecom, aerospace, legal, retail, engineering, technology, publishing, and education.
The Pulse report was conducted by Gatepoint Research among 1,000 executives in the US in 2012.
