As more organizations embrace the cloud for high-performance database workloads, they must make critical decisions about which platform(s) to use to store, manage, and analyze their data. More organizations are discovering that the public cloud is a viable alternative to on-premises SAN systems for storage-intensive database workloads. A recent Lightbits customer survey found that 60% of respondents use the public cloud for their data. But this is just the beginning of a significant market switch. We expect the coming years to see even more organizations move to the cloud as bottlenecks in native cloud storage (speed, latency, and economics) are replaced by third-party marketplace solutions like Lightbits.
The rise of high-performance DBs in the cloud
An interesting trend from our annual cloud survey is the shift towards high-performance databases in the cloud. Most (80%) respondents indicated that their organizations support distributed, high-availability, or other types of databases.
The most widely adopted data processing applications among these businesses were MySQL and Oracle, indicating a growing need to migrate cost-effective relational databases to the cloud. This finding in our survey is consistent with other sources, such as DB-Engines ranking and Statista. Additionally, MongoDB stood out as the preferred choice for companies operating in a non-SQL environment.
This shift aligns with the general market trend towards IT leveraging infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which saw 41% growth in 2021, according to Gartner, amassing a value of almost $91 billion. In this landscape, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure dominated with a combined market share of 60%.
Overcoming cloud storage challenges
Survey respondents highlighted the high cost of ownership (50%), poor performance (28%), management complexity (26%), and outdated technology (16%) as the main challenges they face with their current on-premises storage systems. These challenges also create opportunities for innovation and change.
For example, the high cost of ownership suggests that those organizations are yet to establish a strong cloud presence. By leveraging the cloud, businesses can optimize their storage investments, reduce TCO, shorten their time to ROI, reduce their data center footprint and power consumption, stop overprovisioning storage, and switch to a consumption-based infrastructure model.
Poor performance, another challenge that showed up on the survey, often suggests that organizations have not modernized their infrastructure. When paired with storage-optimized Amazon EC2 instances or Microsoft Azure VMs with NVMe drives, a high-performing block solution like Lightbits delivers up to 1M IOPs/volume and is 6X faster than native cloud storage solutions. This makes migrating high-performance databases, like Oracle, to the cloud feasible. See this recent blog post “Maximize Your Oracle Performance On AWS While Keeping Your Costs Low,” from Sagy Volkov, for a comprehensive performance analysis of running Oracle workloads on the public cloud.
Management complexity and overhead, the other significant challenges identified by our survey respondents, can be mitigated with a composable, disaggregated, and software-defined architecture.
Make the switch
New marketplace solutions mitigate yesterday’s cloud storage bottlenecks. Storage latency and poor IOPS no longer limit migrating IO-intensive applications to the cloud. It’s possible to replicate what you love about your on-premises SAN in the cloud: unified storage provisioning, data services, high performance, and low latency.
Lightbits leads storage solution providers with a data platform that delivers agility, flexibility, efficiency, speed, and predictable, lower costs. It’s architected from the ground up to deliver SAN capabilities for the public cloud era.
Our cloud data platform gives businesses the tools they need to move to the cloud, migrating high-performance databases to AWS or Azure. The Lightbits Cloud Data Platform is a software-defined, disaggregated block storage system that works with common orchestration environments such as Kubernetes and VMware and plugs directly into Amazon EC2 instances and/or Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).
We are committed to ensuring organizations can manage the increasing data demands of the future. We help organizations realize the true promise of the cloud: efficiency, scale, simplicity, flexibility, and agility.
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