While 93 percent of the businesses acknowledge the criticality of optimizing application performance across their data centers and networks, three-quarters of them do not feel they are achieving required performance levels, according to a survey of 412 European data center managers by LSI Corporation.

In the LSI survey, data center managers reported that the key inhibitors to adequate application performance are network and storage access bottlenecks. These limits are in many instances the result of massive data traffic increases challenging infrastructures, limited by slower growing budgets; what LSI calls the Data Deluge Gap.

This gap is caused by network traffic and storage capacity needs growing more than 30% per year while IT budgets and spending are growing at much slower rates of only 5 to 7 percent. As a result, today’s explosive data growth is outstripping the infrastructure build-out required to support it, and data center managers are acutely feeling this challenge.

Highlights from the survey findings:

- 25 percent of data center managers report that sub-optimal application performance leads to lost revenue.

- Two in five data center managers worry about the impact of application performance on company competitiveness.

- Flash-based storage is of strong interest, but budget in this area is still low.

- 70 percent of data center managers say network and storage access challenges cause their biggest performance issues, with transaction performance issues leading to lost business.

Data center managers showed strong interest in flash-based storage and understand that solid state disks (SSDs) can accelerate application performance. However, the survey revealed that nearly half don’t yet have budget allocated to the purchase of SSDs and that perceived costs were cited as the biggest reason for many datacentre managers holding back on their adoption of SSDs (92 percent).