NVMe will replace traditional flash, not just co-exist with it, says majority of IT respondents in new European study

Recent research carried out by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a leading IT research, analysis, and strategy firm, and sponsored by storage innovators including Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, has revealed that:

• Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) flash is expected to eventually replace traditional flash storage by 87% of European IT professionals whose organizations are currently using or considering NVMe technology (60% of all respondents).
• Almost 60% of organizations have begun to implement a Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution or are committed to it as a long-term strategy.
• Business intelligence/data analytics, digital media, collaboration and Internet-of-Things (IoT), are most responsible for storage capacity growth today, with eCommerce, and social networking data not far behind.
• Over half of organizations are likely to consider purchasing their storage infrastructure from a startup, a reversal of longstanding perceptions.

ESG’s 2017 European Storage Trends Survey of over 400 European IT professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing and managing data storage further shows that decision-makers are buying differently as next-generation technology rewrites data centre economics, and preparing their architectures accordingly.

1. NVMe deployments are here: 10% of respondent organizations are already using NVMe, 26% are planning to deploy it, and another 34% say they are interested in deploying NVMe-based technologies. In addition, 31% of current NVMe users and planned adopters think that advanced storage networking protocols such as NVMe will become a dominant storage networking protocol.

2. Those ignoring software-defined storage (SDS) are a minority with 80% either committed to SDS, planning to invest in SDS, or interested in deploying SDS.

3. Cost-reduction, performance and hardware flexibility top the list of the most important messages that IT professionals wish to hear from vendors.

4. Perceptions are changing: over half of respondents say their organization would buy data storage infrastructure from startups. This is indicative of the way that emerging companies are delivering higher-performance options for today’s storage challenges and more competitive price plans.

5. New pain points have emerged, as data analytics and other large-scale applications demand more from even today’s most advanced storage technology. With growing awareness that the limitations of NVMe drives at scale results in capacity and performance waste, the market is primed for new options such as Excelero’s NVMesh technology, a software-defined block storage solution that enables unmodified applications to enjoy the latency, throughput and IOPs of a local NVMe device while benefiting from centralized, redundant storage.

"This latest research from ESG shows that we are headed in the right direction and developing a technology that fulfils current and pressing requirements," said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder of Excelero. "We are excited to watch NVMe adoption increase at high speed, and note the profound shift in IT buyer receptivity to smarter ways of deploying scale-out storage architectures."