AberdeenGroup recently surveyed 140 end-users to measure the adoption rate for server and storage virtualization technologies, along with the business drivers, challenges and responses to those barriers. As expected, the end-users who responded to the survey revealed that business organizations are continuing to look towards virtualization to help solve many of the problems that are currently plaguing IT departments. The report shows that server and storage virtualization adoption are traveling on a parallel course, with server virtualization moving ahead of the curve compared to storage virtualization since there seems to be a more immediate cost savings associated with server virtualization.
According to the 21-page report, 50% of the overall respondents are either evaluating or plan to adopt server virtualization within six to 18 months which means there will be a large increase in the number of virtualization implementations in the near future. Another interesting find is that 52% of the overall respondents are using virtualization technologies within their production environments. This is a clear sign that organizations are starting to trust the technology to their mission critical systems as opposed to simply making use of the technology in a dev/test or disaster recovery model.
InovaWave, the leader in virtualization performance software, helped support Aberdeen's research efforts. "We were very excited to support Aberdeen's independent research on Virtualization," stated Terry Ferose, CEO and founder of InovaWave. "The findings in the study underscore why our virtualization performance and scalability products are a critical element to a successful virtualization strategy."
"Our survey findings found that end-users are moving towards virtualization as a remedy to their existing data center pain points, including server consolidation, poor disk capacity and CPU utilization rates, as well as a general need to reduce costs," said Sonia R. Lelii, storage research analyst at Aberdeen Group's Information Management practice. "We also found that companies experienced better cost savings through improved utilization rates the more virtualized their environments became. InovaWave’s solution seems to have entered the market at the right time as it attempts to answer many of these problem areas within virtualization.”
As an example, two of the leading server virtualization business drivers identified in this report include server consolidation and the need to improve utilization rates. These are two of the key areas that InovaWave is currently focused on and for which provide an answer with their DXtreme family of products. DXtreme allows you to maximize the server consolidation ratios that you can achieve in your environment, thereby achieving a better cost savings. Likewise, the DXtreme software can also offer you a better utilization rate across your virtual infrastructure by ensuring that your servers aren't being slowed down or tied up because of the I/O bottleneck.
It's clear that virtualization has proven itself as a valuable technology when it comes to maximizing your hardware investment and reducing the footprint of your data center. And now more than ever, organizations are starting to recognize the benefits of virtualization as is evident from the findings in Aberdeen's virtualization benchmark report.
Click HERE to access the 21-page Aberdeen virtualization benchmark report as it details its server and storage virtualization findings.