Seanodes released the results of a third-party survey of IT professionals that shows that the transition from direct attached storage to networked storage is dictated by needs that come with server virtualization, such as VM migration, elevating costs and complexity, while taxing performance and management.

The survey, with respondents including network and systems administrators and other IT personnel from organizations of all sizes, sheds light on how virtualized infrastructures raise the levels of stress and demand on networked storage, creating a tenuous situation of economic sustainability against the high costs of improved storage performance.

“To fully benefit from server virtualization, you need a very complex and dynamic storage infrastructure, which only high-end systems offer,” said Jacques Baldinger, CEO of Seanodes. “The extreme consolidation of virtual machines onto only a few physical servers hosting dozens of very demanding applications is complex and creates problems in terms of management, reliability and performance, which is unacceptable. Our goal at Seanodes is to alleviate these issues.”

With more than two-thirds of those questioned listing cost and nearly half indicating complexity as factors concerning their storage operations, it may explain why 50 percent of respondents are seeking a better alternative to Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs and NAS.

Among the survey’s other findings:

• Nearly 60 percent of respondents would be interested in taking advantage of existing, unused local disks within their storage environment to meet their needs versus acquiring additional external storage
• More than half of those surveyed are interested in solutions that allow them to reclaim unused storage space on application servers as if it were a shared storage pool
• 63 percent of respondents have at least 50 percent of unused storage capacity still available in their application servers

Taking advantage of existing unused local disks as opposed to acquiring additional external storage is the approach used by Seanodes’ Exanodes software, which reclaims underutilized internal disk capacity and aggregates it in a shared storage pool. By virtualizing internal storage assets, Exanodes enables full infrastructure consolidation, driving down both capital and operational costs by minimizing hardware expenditures, simplifying storage and server administration, and reducing power and cooling expenses.

Seanodes was named one of five “Cool Vendors” by Gartner for providing “an alternative to traditional external storage capacity expansion.” Exanodes software reduces costs, complexity and eases management pain points inherent to unstructured data sprawl found in many of today’s network storage infrastructures.