Survey Shows Virtualization Taking Off
Mar. 27, 2007

Bonus question time: Guess which technology is viewed as being so critical to enterprise IT infrastructures that nearly nine out of 10 companies have implemented or plan to implement it?

If you chose virtualization, proceed directly to Go and give yourself $200. A new InformationWeek Research survey of business technology professionals found that 65 percent of companies are already using virtualized servers and another 24 percent are planning to deploy them.

Why are these companies turning to virtualization? Server consolidation, disaster recovery support and software testing were the leading reasons. Most companies use a combination of IT staffers and software tools to manage virtual servers, and 40 percent report that they transfer virtual machines between servers.

The widespread adoption of virtualization shows that scaling out with open standards is not necessarily adding servers and storage systems to enterprise infrastructures. With virtualization, you can consolidate servers onto fewer, more powerful platforms—a definite scale out advantage—thereby simplifying management, speeding up the launch of new applications and reducing TCO.

So here’s the paradox: scaling out can actually be scaling back—not of IT services or performance, but in terms of the infrastructure’s sprawl and complexity. And that’s a good thing.

If your company has implemented virtualization, please take a moment to tell us why. Was it to consolidate, to deploy new applications more quickly, to simplify management, or to achieve higher availability and faster recovery? Beyond that, is virtualization performing better or worse than you hoped it would, and why?

Posted by Andy Mazer 03.27.07

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