Cloud service providers are early adopters, and even the smaller ones tend to have thousands of virtual machines under their control, says the latest study of how the CSPs are using storage by Tintri. Its conclusions chime well with Tintri's message of storage virtualisation and scaleability.
Looking at what services the CSPs it surveyed delivered showed a familiar pattern with a more diverse set of services offered by smaller CSPs, though the predominant remain infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at 84%, private cloud hosting at 67% and more traditional managed services at 48%. More granular data show that larger CSPs have a much stronger holding in managed services while smaller CSPs have marched into disaster recovery as a service (DraaS), as other studies ave shown, since this is a logical entry point for SME customers.
Given that CSPs are often early adopters it’s not surprising to see OpenStack gaining some traction. Some 29% of CSPs plan to adopt OpenStack in less than 1 year, says the study. Otherwise the hypervisors in use follow the usual pattern: CSPs overwhelmingly use VMware vSphere (95%),
though multi-hypervisor strategies already prevail in most environments. Microsoft Hyper-V came in second at 33%, and OpenStack third at 31%, with RHEV at 11%, Citrix XenServer at 9%, and others (KVM) at 5%. Nearly one-third of CSPs spend more than 10% of their revenue on storage—making it one of (if not the most) significant cost outlays. Another 46% of CSPs spend between 5% and 10% of revenue on storage, while 23% have contained spend to less than 5%, says the survey.
Interestingly, and similar to other studies, including one by IT Europa here the top three criteria CSPs use to evaluate storage are diverse, but performance stands head and shoulders above the rest, with 86% of CSPs considering it a top criterion. Next, 69% considered reliability/availability/serviceability a top feature, with cost appearing some way down the list.
Tintri concludes that CSPs need to align storage with virtualisation; and that given the heavy competition in cloud services, CSPs need to stand apart (and expand margins) by offering highly differentiated services. Today, that’s often accomplished by procuring different tiers of storage. Looking ahead, they need to build on storage that allows them to isolate virtualised applications and set different Quality of Service tiers on a single device, Tintri says.
Report available here