WHAT’S HOT wor ld news
Subscribe to our weekly email newsletter at:
www.snseurope.info
20 per cent of organisations boast fully virtualised IT estates
Computacenter has revealed the polarised state of the virtualisation market today. According to the research of over 200 IT decision makers at Cloud Computing World Forum, 20% of organisations have no form of virtualisation in-house, but an equal 20% have fully virtualised systems. Overall, half of organisations admitted that their overriding priority this year was making their IT infrastructure cloud-ready.
“Organisations are still being pragmatic when it comes to virtualisation and cloud,” said Andrew Vize, Propositions and Strategy Director, Computacenter. “Most organisations do view cloud computing as a major focus for their business, but many corporate infrastructures are simply not ready – nor may they ever be – for a full-scale switch to cloud computing. The majority of companies are still focused on becoming ‘cloud-ready’ and virtualising infrastructure, ensuring that systems are prepared for cloud before making the leap.”
According to the research, 28% of organisations are looking to migrate many of their workloads to cloud this year, with a more cautious 72% focusing on testing individual cloud functions, such as email, testing / development and hosting.
IT decision makers are still being bombarded with a number of other concerns, including those around security (16%), unified communications (14%) and DR (7%). In fact, 18% said that they were juggling multiple IT projects this year, including networking,
Survey emphasises the need for modern approach to the virtual environment The adoption of server virtualisation continues
to accelerate as organisations of all sizes consolidate physical servers in an effort to rein in costs, improve application management and streamline IT operations. With those benefits comes a myriad of data protection challenges as users discover that legacy platforms are incapable of keeping up with the scale, scope and performance requirements of the virtual world. In order to keep pace with the data management needs of the virtualised data center, organisations are re-evaluating protection strategies in search of a better way to protect, manage and recover their environments.
Server virtualisation demand and deployments are strong and have continued to accelerate year on year among CommVault customers despite the ongoing economic downturn.
The results of CommVault’s annual Virtualisation Survey, which polled Simpana® software customers worldwide, reveal the major factors driving this continued adoption of server virtualisation technologies, as well as the top data protection challenges associated with protecting virtualised environments.
unified communications, disaster recovery and security. Because of this pressure, 8% of IT decision makers admitted that they are neither looking to migrate to cloud nor looking to become cloud-ready this year, with other priorities taking up their budgets and mindshare.
“As always, organisations have many projects competing for share of mind and budget,” continued Vize. “It’s no surprise that around a fifth have no form of virtualisation in-house, nor that 51% are looking to be cloud-ready rather than actually migrate. We have seen a number of organisations asking for off- premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions and a number forging ahead with ‘full’ cloud and virtualisation projects. However, this approach is coupled with a good understanding of the need for caution and due diligence, and after the sheer volume of ‘cloudwash’ and hype we will undoubtedly now see a number of well thought-out, productive and effective cloud uses.”
Survey respondents also show a groundswell of support for running business-critical applications on virtual machines in their production environment, including application servers (93%), Web servers (84%), databases (72%) and messaging applications (53%).
Overall, the adoption of server virtualisation has increased year on year with 34 percent of the 388 survey respondents stating their server environments were 75 percent - 100 percent virtualised. VMware continues to own the lion’s share of the market vis-à-vis Microsoft and Citrix with 85 percent of those polled listing VMware as their hypervisor platform of choice.
The survey revealed the top three factors driving the adoption of server virtualisation among the respondents are: the need to improve cost savings through operational efficiency, reduction of capital expenditures related to hardware purchases or licensing acquisition costs, and improved ease of management.
10
www.snseurope.info I October/November 2011
According to those polled, the three most cited primary concerns surrounding the deployment of data protection solutions in virtual server environments were cost, ineffective backups and lengthy and complex restore processes. As users continue to adopt and expand server virtualisation, 27 percent of respondents said that improving the backup and recovery process is one of the top initiatives for 2012. In addition, 18 percent plan to make use of virtual machine replication for disaster recovery and another 10 percent said they plan to improve overall operational processes in managing virtual environments.
As virtual environments continue to be complex and heterogeneous with products from multiple vendors, integration and interoperability is important. In terms of data protection, however, 90 percent of respondents said they prefer a single backup application for virtual and physical environments.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44