Scalability and Cost the Biggest Challenges to NVMe Storage Adoption

According to a survey of IT decision-makers from across the UK and Germany, organizations adopting NVMe storage currently face two main challenges: scalability and cost. In addition, the respondents indicated that irrespective of their industry, they still need NVMe to offer greater flexibility, manageability, and affordability.

The above limitations notwithstanding, NVMe has opened up new opportunities for data-hungry and business-critical applications that demand low-latency, high-performance enterprise storage connectivity. This is thanks partly to NVMe’s ability to reach significantly higher performance levels than alternatives such as SAS via a lighter command set and switched transport architecture. However, this also introduces a downside when it comes to scalability, cost, reliability, serviceability, management, and environmental awareness.

In the survey, IT decision-makers in the UK and Germany from across a range of industries including professional services, telecom, financial, manufacturing, and retail, were asked: “Which of the following challenges have you or your organization experienced in adopting NVMe storage solutions?”

Key findings include:

31% of respondents reported that scaling NVMe into larger data pools is a key challenge. They stated that they were looking for more flexibility and better management tools. Respondents in the IT, technology and telecom industries were most likely to report that scaling NVMe was a challenge at 36%.
27% shared that the cost of NVMe is a challenge, saying that they are struggling to justify the investment. This does not come as a surprise considering the current dynamic nature of global markets.
20% of respondents said NVMe revealed weaknesses in other parts of their storage infrastructures. Interestingly, the business and professional services sector was split between this and NVMe scaling and management being a challenge at 32%.
Only 12% reported not experiencing challenges adopting NVMe in their organizations.

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The survey was conducted September 2021 by Vanson Bourne, Ltd for ATTO Technology, Inc.