Just over half of Blocks & Files readers work for organizations with more than a petabyte of on-premises data and the amount of file storage is increasing considerably more than SAN and object storage.
These are the headline results detailed in a report looking at how organizations are managing and storing ever more data on-premises. We asked more than 600 organizations worldwide from a range of industries, via a reader survey, to indicate how much data they were managing, and what technologies they were using to do so.
One of the first questions we asked was about the amount of stored data:
Just under half stored less than a petabyte while 14 percent had more than 100PB – quite a range. Twenty percent of our sample worked for organizations with 10,000 employees or more. A third of them managed 100PB or more of data.
About 86 percent of the organizations represented in our survey said that their digital data storage was increasing, 10 percent said it was static, and just under 5 percent said it was decreasing. We were surprised anyone said that.
We looked at on-premises storage types and found that 48.9 percent were increasing external block (SAN) use. However results were skewed; 60 percent of the larger organizations said they were increasing SAN usage.
Just over half of our respondents said on-prem object storage use was increasing. Again, 65 percent of the larger organizations are increasing object storage use.
The on-prem file storage picture was more clear cut; almost 70 percent were increasing that and just under 24 percent were decreasing it. Three-quarters of the larger organizations were increasing it.
On-prem files are increasing faster than objects, which are growing faster than block storage. The big are getting bigger, so to speak, and preferring files over objects and blocks.
We compared server SAN (HCI or hyperconverged infrastructure) use with actual SAN usage. Just over 40 percent used SANs, and 25.5 percent used HCI, with a third using neither. It seems the HCI replacement of SANs is not happening.
Download a copy of the report here.
