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Research and Markets’ Latest Report: “Vendor Landscape: Virtualization Competition Heats Up”

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Via VMBlog comes word of a new report from Research and Markets titled: “Vendor Landscape: Virtualization Competition Heats Up”:

“VMware retains its leadership position in this updated vendor landscape of virtualization software. However, the virtualization market has seen greatly increased competition in 2008. Microsoft has emerged as a legitimate competitor through its release of the Hyper-V hypervisor and Citrix has stormed onto the scene with its acquisition of XenSource.

This research note provides an overview of the x86 server virtualization landscape and addresses how the vendors meet the following key selection criteria:

-Vendor and product maturity.
-Advanced features and suitability for a utility infrastructure.
-Cost of licensing.

VMware remains in the leadership zone due to its market share and continued innovation toward comprehensive data center virtualization. However, where VMware was the only game in town a few short years ago, now the competition has become serious. Going into 2009, expect continued feature innovation and pressure on pricing. ”

Another Study Predicts Huge and Rapid Virtualization Market Growth

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Application Delivery Networking provider F5 Networks today released the results of another survey that shows the storage virtualization market is set to grow rapidly. The online study reveals the percentage of U.S. enterprises that use storage virtualization solutions will more than double from 21 % to 47 % in the next few years.

F5 Networks

The survey of 324 medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations in the U.S. and Europe was conducted in February and found that a primary driver for enterprise interest in storage virtualization is reduction in operating expense and capital investment. Underscoring their interest in reducing costs, respondents indicated that 20 % of IT labor is spent on storage-related activities such as provisioning, backup, and moving data.

“We continue to see enterprise storage requirements grow at a remarkable rate, particularly for file-based, unstructured data,” said Steve Bishop, CTO at VeriStor Systems. “As a solutions provider specializing in advanced data storage and virtualization architectures, VeriStor is constantly seeking ways to help our customers reduce storage costs, improve resource utilization, and simplify storage administration. Technologies such as F5’s Intelligent File Virtualization are key to enabling those types of solutions.”

Other findings from the survey included:

  • Respondents stressed the need for storage virtualization solutions to work with a heterogeneous storage infrastructure. Sixty-three percent of U.S. companies rated this as important or very important.
  • Respondents showed a strong interest in solutions that address file-based storage — with 80 percent of respondents who are planning to deploy storage virtualization confirming this as part of their plan.
  • Existing storage virtualization users reported high success rates. Eighty-six percent of all U.S. companies reported achieving at least one or more of their original goals.

For additional survey information and results, please download the PDF from the following location: www.f5.com/pdf/news/20080404-state-of-storage-virtualization.pdf.

[Source: press release]