ActualTech Media, in partnership with Atlantis Computing, has released its Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCIS) and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) 2016 Survey to provide insight on how IT organizations are building modern data centers in 2016 and beyond. The survey, conducted with more than 1,267 data center leaders from 53 countries, revealed that 71% either already use or are considering adoption of HCIS or SDS.

"There is a lot of confusion and hype in the fast changing HCIS and SDS markets and it is critical to gather data about real-world usage," explained Scott D. Lowe, partner and co-founder of ActualTech Media. "We believe this is the largest and most detailed account of adoption, buying criteria and use cases for HCIS and SDS. The new report provides IT organizations with critical insights on how HCIS and SDS technologies are being used, actual experiences from the field and the future plans of data center leaders from around the world."

Why are Organizations Adopting SDS and HCI?

While 75% or organizations currently use disk-based storage, only 44% have it as part of their future infrastructure plans. Further, 19% of organizations expect to decommission disk-based SAN entirely in favor of either HCIS or SDS. When asked about their key decision criteria for adoption of SDS and HCIS, IT organizations cited performance (72%), high availability (68%) and cost (68%) as top requirements.

Continued data growth was also a key driver for change, with median annual data growth rates of 20% reported by survey respondents. Most IT organizations must support these growth rates with flat or decreasing budgets, making the efficiency of data center infrastructure increasingly important for businesses.

"The ActualTech Media survey provides great perspective on the HCIS and SDS markets with results and analyses that simply have not been available in this rapidly growing and evolving category," said Seth Knox, vice president of product marketing at Atlantis. "For the first time, we have access to quantitative data on hypervisor trends, high availability configuration, evaluation criteria, software versus hardware HCIS preferences and many other dynamics that will shape the HCIS and SDS markets in 2016."

To download the full survey report, visit http://www2.atlantiscomputing.com/Survey2016.html.