Enterprise Snippets: BYOD, Cloud Storage, TPC Benchmark

IT, Employees Differ on BYOD

A new survey by Mimecast of 500 IT professionals and admins conducted at the Microsoft 2012 DevConnections conference underscored the tension between IT and employees when it comes to “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies.

Nearly half (47 percent) agree that the consumerization of IT is important to an enterprise. In fact, 50.7 of IT professionals in the survey said employee access to their devices was a productivity necessity. However, 26 percent of all respondents say their enterprise doesn’t allow employee use of personal devices for corporate work, and 7.9 percent said personal devices hurt productivity.

IT’s biggest challenge, sited by nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of respondents, is managing information security; 34.4 percent said it was managing the volume of devices.

What’s scary about the cloud, according to 70.3 percent of those surveyed, is “not having the skill set to keep up with new services.”

Over a third (34 percent) of respondents say the impact to their organization of BOYD is “tough but manageable.”

Storage Infrastructure Hampering Cloud Performance

DataCore Software’s second annual survey of software and private clouds found that “storage-related challenges to virtualizations and private cloud deployments are transitioning from being cost-central to performance- and availability-centric.” More than a third (34.3 percent) admit they “underestimated the impact server/desktop virtualization would have on their storage costs.” The figure was 28.1 percent for respondents using a private cloud.

In the survey of 289 companies in North America and Europe, 63.3 percent put downtime and slow application performance at the top of their list of storage-related concerns, up from 35.7 percent of respondents in 2011. The company notes that cost considerations are typical early in a project, and they’re still of concern to 50.9 percent of respondents (though that’s down from 66.1 percent last year).

Performance isn’t being improved when IT increases its storage budget, and complaints about application performance due to their storage infrastructure rose this year to 31.5 percent of respondents, up from 25.3 percent last year. Worse, 31.8 percent have suffered from downtime due to storage-related problems.

Concern may be down, but costs still gobble up more than a quarter of IT’s budget according to 44 percent of respondents. In fact, 37 percent say their storage budgets have increased in the last year.

TPC Launches New Industry Standard Benchmark

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) announced a new decision support benchmark named TPC-DS; it measures “query throughput and data integration performance for a given hardware configuration, operating system, and DBMS configuration under a controlled, complex, multi-user decision support workload.”

According to Meikel Poess, the TPC-DS committee chairman, “It is the first benchmark specification to integrate key workloads of modern decision support systems including ad-hoc queries, reporting queries, OLAP queries, data mining queries and data integration from OLTP systems.”

More information cam be found at www.tpc.org/tpcds/.

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted on 05/07/2012