Survey Reveals Challenges Enterprises Face in Supporting Growing Edge Workloads

By 2025, IDC predicts organizations will churn out 175 zetta-bytes of data. However, our recent survey of more than 300 storage professionals, found that bottlenecks and compute problems continue to plague IT pros as they struggle to support their growing edge workloads. In the study conducted by Dimensional Research, barely one in 10 respondents gave themselves an “A” grade for their compute and storage capabilities.

The study, designed to understand the adoption and challenges of edge-related workloads, discovered that while enterprises are rapidly deploying technologies for real-time analytics, machine learning and IoT, they are still utilizing legacy storage solutions that are not designed for such data-intensive workloads. In fact, 54 percent of respondents said their processing of edge applications is a bottleneck, and they desire faster and more intelligent storage solutions.

Above all, the report found that organizations simply aren’t happy with the performance of their workloads at the edge. Most organizations (55 percent) are currently deploying workloads at the edge. While enterprises are rapidly deploying technologies for real-time analytics (71 percent), they are still utilizing legacy storage solutions that are not designed for such data-intensive workloads. With the rapid growth of edge computing, compute cost and speed are still major challenges, as more organizations look for faster and more intelligent storage solutions. These issues have provoked pros to look to new computational models that have a lower power footprint and to storage devices with smaller form-factors, which is why 89 percent of respondents said they expect real value from Computational Storage.

As enterprises become more aware of the true potential of NVMe SSDs to bring compute directly to storage, adoption will rise even faster and edge performance will increase dramatically.

To read the survey download a free copy of the report