We just completed our 5th annual I/O Performance Survey that was conducted with 906 IT Professionals. This is the industry’s largest study of its kind and the research highlights the latest trends in applications that are driving performance demands and how IT Professionals are responding.

I/O Growth Continues to Outpace Expectations

The results show that organizations are struggling to get the full lifecycle from their backend storage as the growth of I/O continues to outpace expectations. The research also shows that IT Pros continue to struggle with user complaints related to sluggish performance from their I/O intensive applications, especially citing MS-SQL applications.

Comprehensive Research Data

The survey consists of 27 detailed questions designed to identify the impact of I/O growth in the modern IT environment. In addition to multiple choice questions, the survey included optional open responses, allowing a respondent to provide commentary on why they selected a particular answer.  All the individual responses have been included to help readers dive deeply on any question. The full report is available at IO-Performance-Study

Summary of Key Findings 

1.    I/O Performance is important to IT Pros: The vast majority of IT Pros consider I/O Performance an important part of their job responsibilities. Over a third of these note that growth of I/O from applications is outpacing the useful lifecycle they expect from their underlying storage. 

2.    Application performance is suffering: Half of the IT Pros responsible for I/O performance cite they currently have applications that are tough to support from a systems performance standpoint. The toughest applications stated were: SQL, SAP, Custom/Proprietary apps, Oracle, ERP, Exchange, Database, Data Warehouse, Dynamics, SharePoint, and EMR/EHR. See page 20 for a word cloud graphic. 

3.    SQL is the top troublesome application: The survey confirms that SQL databases are the top business critical application platform and is also the environment that generates the most storage I/O traffic. Nearly a third of the IT Pros responsible for I/O performance state that they are currently experiencing staff/customer complaints due to sluggish applications running on SQL. 

4.    Buying hardware has not solved the performance problems: Nearly three-fourths of IT Pros have added new hardware to improve I/O performance. They have purchased new servers with more cores, new all-flash arrays, new hybrid arrays, server-side SSDs, etc. and yet they still have concerns. In fact, a third have performance concerns that are preventing them from scaling their virtualized infrastructures.  

5.    Still planning to buy hardware: About three-fourths of IT Pros are still planning to continue to invest in hardware to improve I/O performance. 

6.    Lack of awareness: Over half of respondents were unaware of the fact that Windows write inefficiencies generate increasingly smaller writes and reads that dampen performance and that this is a software problem that is not solved by adding new hardware. 

7.    Improve performance via software to avoid expensive hardware purchase: The vast majority of respondents felt it would be urgent/important to improve the performance of their applications via an inexpensive I/O reduction software and avoid an expensive forklift upgrade to their compute, network or storage layers. 

Most Difficult to Support Applications

Below is a word cloud representing hundreds of answers to visually show the application environments IT Pros are having the most trouble to support from a performance standpoint. I think you can see the big ones that pop out!

The full report is available at IO-Performance-Study

The Simple Software Answer

As much as organizations continue to reactively respond to performance challenges by purchasing expensive new server and storage hardware, our V-locity® I/O reduction software offers a far more efficient path by guaranteeing to solve the toughest application performance challenges on I/O intensive systems like MS-SQL. This means organizations are able to offload 50% of I/O traffic from storage that is nothing but mere noise chewing up IOPS and dampening performance. As soon as we open up 50% of that bandwidth to storage, sluggish performance disappears and now there’s far more storage IOPS to be used for other things.

In just 2 minutes, learn more about how V-locity I/O reduction software eliminates the two big I/O inefficiencies in a virtual environment 2-min Video: Condusiv® I/O Reduction Software Overview

Try it for yourself, download our free 30-day trial – no reboot required