Vizioncore Inc., the market leader in virtual server management, announced that the ability of organizations to recover from failure is much quicker using virtualization according to an end-user survey conducted at the VMworld Europe conference in February 2008. Of the more than 200 responses, 76 percent of those surveyed stated that they could recover a virtual machine within two hours, while 73 percent stated that virtualization had helped them to reduce application downtime. However, just over a third of all organizations that have implemented virtualization do not have a specific disaster recovery strategy in place to protect their environments.

“The role of virtualization within businesses has gone well beyond just server consolidation,” said Chris Akerberg, President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore. “The results of this survey show that improved business continuity and accelerated disaster recovery are now significant drivers for uptake of virtualization. The fact that many organizations still lack a proper disaster recovery strategy for their virtual infrastructures highlights the significant opportunity that exists in this area and is why we feel we are increasingly well positioned to help them protect their mission-critical applications running on virtual machines. This is just part of why we see management tools playing a huge role in helping customers become even more comfortable with virtualization and making the potential benefits of the technology a reality for organizations of all sizes.”

While server consolidation remains a significant reason for implementing virtualization, with 93 percent of customers citing this as one of their primary drivers, other benefits are also proving to be increasingly important to organizations considering virtualization. Other key drivers include reduced hardware costs (56 percent), improved disaster recovery (54 percent) and centralized management (50 percent). Virtual desktop deployment was also listed as being a reason for virtualizing the data center, with around 20 percent of attendees either implementing or planning to implement Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Only three percent listed “green” IT as a driver for them. “We were surprised at the level of interest in VDI from the people we surveyed,” said Akerberg. “It indicates this is clearly going to be a big area for development of virtualization in the future. The lack of interest in ‘green’ is also significant – it would seem that users see this as a fringe benefit, rather than being a key reason for implementation.”

The survey was conducted in February 2008 by Vizioncore at the VMworld Europe conference in Cannes, France. Overall, 214 respondents took part across a wide variety of company sizes and market types. A full list of results is available upon request.