Why budget handlers 'are biggest hurdle to all-flash adoption'

A lack of understanding of the new role of storage in the enterprise is hampering adoption of flash, it is claimed.

Tony Lock, an analyst with Freeform Dynamics, said that for the first time in IT history, storage was becoming visible as an investment decision in its own right, rather than bundled with other expenditure.

"Budget holders ... really don't understand the importance of storage because until the last four or five years, storage has always been acquired as part of something else - those new applications, that big infrastructure refresh, it's been bought alongside servers," Lock told attendees at an HP roundtable today.

"Getting execs to understand why we need to invest and what we should buy is really important and it's something [IT] still has difficulty convincing people about," he added.

In addition to convincing those who hold the purse strings of the need to invest in storage separately from other purchases, Lock said the way budgets are planned can also prevent investment in new storage infrastructure.

This in turn stops organisations from taking advantage of the main benefits of flash storage, such as increased performance, better reliability, and ease of management.

"[IT] budgets are still essentially siloed," said Lock. "They might have things on a product basis rather than as a shared infrastructure, whereas a lot of the things we're talking about with virtualisation and consolidation means that they need to buy platforms that are used by more than one application."

"In the past you bought an application that ran on a server that had storage. Now to get best efficiency and use of that infrastructure you need shared platforms. Not all of [IT departments'] budgets are running in that way yet," he concluded.