NEWS ANALYSIS the bigger truth
to higher consolidation ratios) exposes the inefficiencies of backup strategies carried over from the physical world. Second, management tools and operations are undergoing massive changes in response to scale and complexity issues, and so are backup and recovery.
Of virtualization users polled by ESG, nearly one-third (31%) cite improvements in application availability at the Progressing level. However, it’s only a modest increase over Basic level respondents (27%). Virtual machine mobility and automated load balancing within the data center help with that. Similarly, 38% of survey respondents classified at the Progressing level cite improvements in disaster recovery capabilities, a slight advancement over those at the Basic level (27%). The opportunity to surpass these statistics at the Progressing level is there – if wise infrastructure decisions are made in the previous stage.
Looking forward to the next phase of virtualization—one characterized by optimization – it’s important to consider technologies and features in Progressing level infrastructure purchases that can create new levels of efficiency to accelerate the optimization expected at the next phase of growth.
Storage at Advanced Level Virtualization Initiatives
By the time an organization reaches the Advanced level, so too have their IT staffs’ virtualization skills. This level is characterized by basic services, tier-2 applications, and some tier-1 production applications and workloads running in virtual machines. Here, the focus shifts from scale to optimization. Beyond what was already covered, the sheer growth of virtualized data has become a major user challenge at this point. Anything that can help to optimize the storage infrastructure is good.
This level is also characterized by the primary benefits it brings: mainly improved availability, backup, and disaster recovery. In fact, about half (58%) of ESG’s Advanced level survey respondents have improved their disaster recovery capabilities versus those at the Progressing level (38%) or those at the Basic level (27%). In examining backup and recovery, a similar profile emerges: Advanced
respondents were twice as likely as Progressing respondents (48% vs. 22%, respectively) to be very satisfied with backup and recovery of virtual machines, and Progressing respondents were twice as likely as Basic respondents (22% vs. 9%, respectively) to be very satisfied. Over half (51%) of Advanced versus 34% of Progressing and 26% of Basic respondents saw an improvement in backup and recovery processes with the introduction of server virtualization, while 34% of Advanced, 23% of Progressing, and 18% of Basic respondents reduced recovery time objectives (RTOs) and improved recovery point objectives (RPOs).
Advanced level IT organizations should consider embracing virtualization in all pockets of infrastructure: server, storage, and network. The benefits of virtualization are not only extended to other component tiers, but the combination can amplify the benefits of each.
The ESG Server Virtualization Maturity Model has a few sprint-like phases. Knowing what typically happens and when, and planning virtualization deployment informed by the model could go a long way toward achieving success faster, better, and more cost-effectively.
1 Source: ESG Research Report, The Evolution of Server Virtualization, November 2010. 14
www.snseurope.info I October/November 2011
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