What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
2012 in Virtualization – Fixing the Breaking Points
Contributed
Article by Todd Zambrovitz, senior product marketing manager for virtualization, Symantec Corporation
We are all familiar with the rapid growth of
virtualization technologies in both enterprises and SMBs. It was the number one spending priority in
2011, according to ESG. And, 50 to 60
percent of workloads will be virtualized by 2014 (up from 25 percent today),
according to Gartner. At the same time,
in 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8
zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) - growing by a factor of nine in just five
years. And a lot of this data is now
being stored in virtual environments.
As IT organizations have tried to strike the
right balance between managing, protecting, and securing virtual environments,
while taking the steps to capitalize on the new technology, the industry is
quickly reaching a breaking point when it comes to managing the data stored on
virtual machines. This will require further consolidation and automation
of technologies and processes to unlock the value of these transforming
trends. And that's why our predictions for 2012 focus on steps
organizations will take to manage and protect virtual environments more
efficiently.
Prediction #1: Increased Interdependence of Physical and
Virtual Technologies
Virtualization projects often start as a
small project and eventually grow into large portions of the IT environment. In
2012, many companies will combine the VM project teams and infrastructure with
corporate IT. This will highlight the need for physical and virtual assets to
work together as a platform.
During the recent VMworld conference, we were
surprised to see how many six-foot-tall server racks were at the event (one
employee took pictures next to 15 different hardware racks). Often IT
professionals get so consumed with the buzz surrounding virtualization that
they forget that virtualization still runs on physical hardware. Of course, there is new
hardware that is needed for those new projects, meaning more capital costs up
front, but more painfully, less utilization due to more server/storage islands.
Companies that adopt a silo
approach will be laggards in the VM adoption race. Their ROI for virtualization
will continue to decrease as operational costs of running separate environments
slow the ability of organizations to convert from physical to virtual. The days
that companies could afford separate storage management and backup software for
virtual and physical servers are numbered. The answer to managing this
complexity is standardizing across their various platforms with tools that work
across the various physical and virtual platforms for systems management,
availability, back-up, storage management, security, etc.
As a result the security, storage management
and backup of both physical and virtual assets together will become the
standard.
Prediction #2: Virtual Machine Backup Fights Back in 2012
You can't call backup a boring market
anymore. The backup market is growing fast. What used to be considered a mature
and slow growth market is putting up some impressive numbers. Integrated VM
protection, deduplication, snapshot management, appliances and some key changes
to the operating model are driving the change.
Organizations that rely on
snapshots rather than backup and don't implement deduplication or granular
recovery technology for virtual environments will see backup and recovery
windows increase. However, new technologies introduced by vendors will change
the way data protection is done, saving organizations millions of dollars each
year.
Additionally, organizations that are using a
different backup tool for every platform have created an unsustainable level of
complexity within their environment. There needs to be a higher level of
centralization, especially if companies expect to move to the cloud and
continue to virtualize their infrastructure. Data center managers who have
deployed separate dedupe, snapshot management, tape or disk backup, VMware and
Hyper-V backup strategies will move to simplify the backup process. The idea of
an uber-recovery platform will emerge because recovery from a "Balkanized"
backup environment is very complex. Vendors will need to recentralize
technologies to reduce complexity.
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About the Author
Todd Zambrovitz is the senior product marketing manager
responsible for Symantec's Virtualization marketing efforts. He has spent
the last fourteen years at Symantec working with customers to help them benefit
from new innovations in security, data protection, storage and high
availability technologies. Todd is a frequent speaker at industry events
and customer briefings and has contributed in product marketing, business
development and sales roles during his twenty plus year career in IT. Todd holds a Bachelor of Science degree in
Business Administration from the University of Southern California.