2015 Service Provider Flash-Based Storage Services

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Research on how service providers are using flash storage to create innovative, next generation storage services

BENCHMARK REPORT

The IT industry is going through a massive change spurred by cloud computing. Analysts project 6x more growth in cloud than in traditional IT by 2018 (IDC), representing a window of opportunity for service providers that can bring new cloud services to market quickly and outperform competitors in the areas of cloud platform availability, performance, security, value, and simplicity.

management, scale-out, shared-nothing architecture, and performance quality of service (QoS). As a result, service providers are adopting all-flash arrays (AFAs) that offer these types of capabilities at a rapid pace, with the hopes of achieving greater operational efficiency, reduced performance troubleshooting, improved alignment of costs with revenue, better storage monetization, and greater revenue density in their data centers.

This benchmark report offers cloud and hosting service providers a view into how other service providers that have deployed all-flash arrays, specifically SolidFire’s AFA, are using it in their cloud and hosting platforms. It details how they sell and make money from AFA-based storage services, how they differentiate their services, their degree of storage automation, what challenges are being addressed by AFA, typical ROI timeframes, and in what areas service providers are benefiting from AFA.

To enable this, forward-thinking service providers are placing a greater emphasis on innovation, building software-defined, automated, next generation data centers that are cost-effective and achieve operational and architectural efficiencies in order to not only improve service delivery to customers, but to combat the perpetually rising prices of power, real estate, and labor at the same time.

Storage, a critically important part of any cloud platform, has been slower than its compute and network counterparts at enabling cloud and hosting innovation until very recently. New storage players offering solid-state technologies have brought next generation storage platforms to market with innovative features required to deliver highly available, high performing, highly profitable storage services in multi-tenant environments; features like rich APIs and advanced automation, point-and-click

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Service providers are currently deploying AFAs in public cloud, private cloud, and managed dedicated SAN offerings.

Service providers purchasing and deploying SolidFire AFAs are primarily doing so for use in public clouds (56%), followed by hosted private cloud (51%), and managed hosting/SAN service (35%).

What was the use case for the initial SolidFire purchase?

Public Cloud

Hosted Private Cloud

Managed Hosting/SAN

Hybrid Cloud

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Desktop Servers

Application Hosting Services (DBaaS, Messsaging, Collaboration etc)

Other

56%

51%

35%

30%

28%

21%

16%

2%

Source: TVID: 2E8-DEE-77C

Yet many expect to expand their AFA to support additional use cases, including hybrid cloud and application hosting services, within the next 12-24 months.

What additional use cases are planned for the SolidFire platform within the next 12-24 months?

Hybrid Cloud

Private Cloud

Application Hosting Services (DBaaS, Messsaging, Collaboration etc)

Hosted Private Cloud

Virtual Private Servers

Managed Hosting/SAN

Virtual Desktop Servers

Other

39%

37%

37%

34%

34%

32%

26%

3%

Source: TVID: 21F-729-E94

Service providers using AFAs are catering to a mix of workloads and applications on their cloud and hosting platforms, with web hosting/web content management (76%) and databases (73%) being the top two applications.

What workloads or applications are you specifically catering to on your cloud and/or hosting platforms?

Source: TVID: DFE-FDD-FD5

Web Hosting/Web Contaent Management

Databases

eCommerce/Transaction processing

Dev/Test

PaaS

VDI

Big Data/Analytics

Other

76%

73%

57%

49%

41%

39%

29%

6%

It is not surprising that service providers using AFAs are expanding the use cases supported outside of raw infrastructure/OS to include application hosting services. AFAs allow service providers to deliver a dedicated-style hosting experience on their more cost-effective shared platforms, offering a strong value proposition to a broader set of customers seeking to offload more applications to hosting providers. This is especially true for those that can guarantee predictable IOPS performance for popular workloads that require performance consistency, like web hosting, databases, ecommerce, VDI, and big data.

The majority (98%) of service providers in this survey using SolidFire AFAs said that their multi-tenant storage platforms are able to meet specific IOPS performance needs today.

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Service providers that have deployed AFAs can monetize storage in multiple ways and are able to offer advanced SLAs to customers.While most service providers sell storage in a GB-based capacity model, a majority of respondents (88%) also generate revenue by offering different tiers of storage performance.

In terms of the most widely used orchestration platform, most service providers in this survey are using VMware.

What orchestration platform are you currently using?

Which of the following storage services do you offer to monetize your storage?

Service providers using AFAs are highly automated in their storage operations.While respondents were divided in their degree of automation, a large portion (44%) stated that at least 51% or more of their storage operations are currently automated. Automation creates opportunities to make operations more efficient, streamlining service provisioning and ongoing management/maintenance and lowering opex. Analysts confirm that service providers able to iterate and pivot the quickest to automate complex needs will have a distinct competitive advantage.

While it is no surprise that 90% of service providers offer SLAs based on storage availability, 65% that have deployed SolidFire’s AFA also offer SLAs based on storage performance.

Which of the following storage SLAs do you offer?

Different tiers of performance

GB-based capacity

Encryption

Non-production copies of data

Other

88%

73%

24%

10%

8%

Source: TVID: 9A9-020-CD1

Availablilty

Performance

Tech support response times

Other

90%

65%

54%

2%

Source: TVID: 950-2CD-767

OpenStack

VMware

CloudStack

Other

56%

51%

35%

30%

Source: TVID: 5C6-7D9-C7B

How much of your storage operations are automated today?

0-25%: 27%

26-50%: 29%

51-75%: 24%

76-100%: 20%

Source: TVID: 12F-96F-B14

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SolidFire’s AFA is giving service providers new ways to differentiate their services. SLAs and pricing are the two main ways that service providers in this survey differentiate their cloud and hosting offerings in the market. White glove support and workload or application-specific services follow close behind.

49%49%

45%

43%

“SolidFire will allow us to provide guaranteed performance across multiple storage tiers for our existing and future customers. This capability alone will differentiate us as a service provider in the market, and continue to drive additional value to our customers by meeting their existing and future demands of higher workload requirements far more efficiently than traditional storage architectures.”

TVID: 426-905-D5E

Service providers make the move to AFAs to eliminate performance issues and scaling challenges.Management complexity and lack of automation of previous storage solutions are also key issues prompting a move to AFAs with advanced capabilities, such as those of SolidFire.

How do you differentiate your cloud/hosting services today?

32%

SLAs

Pricing

White glove support

Workload or application-specific application services

Add-on consulting services

Verticle industry-specific application services

Other

19%

6%

Source: TVID: 4CD-F88-572

What issues were your organization experiencing with previous storage platforms that have been or are anticipated to be eliminated with SolidFire?

Performance issues

Scaling challenges

Management complexity

Lack of automation

Array sprawl

Requirements for forklift upgrades

Lack of intergration with orchestration solutions (OpenStack, VMware)

High TCO

Required over provisioning

Long deployment times

Other

70%

65%

47%

33%

26%

21%

19%

19%

19%

14%

14%

Source: TVID: 1B2-F06-EA7

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The biggest impact service providers see from AFAs, in particular SolidFire’s AFA that enables granular, instantaneous, non-disruptive control of performance and performance QoS, is faster storage performance troubleshooting and fewer performance trouble tickets. A natural result of this is improved customer satisfaction, increased revenue, lower costs, and reduced administrative tasks.

When it comes to expected opex savings, the majority of survey respondents say they expect to save 40% or more on overall administrative time for tasks such as performance troubleshooting, capacity planning/design, and upgrades as a result of a move to SolidFire AFA.

“SolidFire underpins all of our services. We don’t use any other storage vendor. This has allowed us to benefit from the operational efficiencies this brings. Because SolidFire requires less cluster management and maintenance compared to other storage vendors, we have more time to focus on clients.”

TVID: 20A-974-18A

The majority of service providers surveyed realize return on investment (ROI) from SolidFire’s AFA 12-18 months after implementation.More than half of service providers surveyed realized or expect to realize ROI within 18 months.

How much administrative time for tasks such as performance troubleshooting, capacity planning/design, and upgrades does your organization expect to save with SolidFire?

Please estimate the actual or expected payback period (ROI) of the initial SolidFire platform investment from the time of implementation?

0-6 months: 0%

6-12 months: 22%

12-18 months: 30%

18-24 months: 22%

Greater than 24 months: 26%

Source: TVID: C97-927-45D 80-100% 60-80% 40-60% 20-40% 10-20%

Overall administrative tasks

Performance troubleshooting

Capacity planning/design

Storage provisioning

Storage upgrades

Source: TVID: 1B2-F06-EA7

What is the greatest impact that solid-state array storage has had on your business?

Increase revenue/GB and lower costs: 12%

Faster/easier capacity planning: 10%

Greater infrastructure consolidation/smaller storage footprint: 14%

Faster storage performance troubleshooting/fewer performance trouble tickets: 37%

Reduced administrative task/time: 12%

Greater customer satisfaction: 14%

Source: TVID: 79B-710-D2F

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“Solidfire has allowed us to scale linearly for performance and capacity, helping to avoid traditional headaches of storage bottlenecks on a multi-tenanted platform. With one storage platform we are able to efficiently and rapidly provision more services, thus increasing our ROI.”

TVID: 0E0-11A-198

ConclusionIt is evident that service providers deploying SolidFire’s AFA are setting themselves up to seize new opportunities afforded by innovative flash technologies, whether those are operational or financial opportunities. From this survey, several consistent trends have surfaced that service providers should take into consideration for future planning:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is no longer enough. Service providers are differentiating themselves and generating revenue through new workload or application-specific services and are attracting more business-critical applications to their cloud and hosting platforms. As a result, infrastructure (especially storage infrastructure) and platform design is taking these applications into account more than ever before, and it will be advantageous for service providers to deploy infrastructure that can handle application-specific needs (especially in the areas of performance predictability and stability), and support a greater density of applications with fewer infrastructure resources.

• When it comes to storage management, performance problems are still the number one pain to resolve. AFAs with QoS capabilities, like SolidFire’s, are helping service providers overcome this pain, creating greater operational efficiency through fewer issues and faster troubleshooting, generating higher customer satisfaction and lower opex. It’s important to note that while flash technology does provide greater performance, flash alone does not solve for inconsistent performance problems or those caused by noisy neighbors. That is enabled only by guaranteed QoS.

• Service providers deploying innovative AFAs, like those of SolidFire with guaranteed QoS, are able to offer new storage services, such as performance SLAs and IOPS tiers, creating new profit centers and helping maximize revenue density in the data center.

It is inevitable that AFAs will be a core requirement for the next generation data center. Yet the degree to which service providers make money from AFAs while also minimizing operational cost and complexity will greatly depend on the AFA vendor’s specific capabilities. Service providers selecting vendors with innovative offerings (i.e. performance QoS, advanced automation of complex needs, simplified management, scale-out, shared-nothing architecture) that enable them to be more nimble will be in a better position to increase their competitiveness and seize the greatest market opportunities.

About this surveyConducted by TechValidate, an independent research organization, this study collected quantitative and qualitative data from over 850 responses received from 98 cloud and managed hosting service provider survey participants around the world. All survey participants are SolidFire customers.

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