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DataCore Survey Suggests Companies Don’t Anticipate Impact Of Storage On Virtualization Project Costs

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A survey commissioned by DataCore (“The State of Virtualization”) finds that a majority of medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations overlook storage when implementing a virtualized operating environment.

The data reveals that nearly half of the respondents (43 percent) had not anticipated the impact that storage would have on their server and desktop virtualization costs or had not started a virtualization project because the storage-related costs “seem too high.” As a result, the rollout of their virtualization projects is delayed.

Of those that have deployed server virtualization, 66 percent cited a substantial increase in storage costs as the biggest problem they are facing. Nearly 40 percent say the storage infrastructure is either slowing application performance or limiting its availability, while more than 20 percent indicate that business continuity has become more difficult.

Over 56% now realize that consolidation creates I/O bottlenecks that prevent them from moving to the next level of virtualization.

The online survey of more than 450 medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations in the North America and Europe was conducted in January 2011. The survey asked a series of questions about virtualization and its impact on storage.

CommVault Releases Results Of End-User Virtualization Survey

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CommVault last week released the results of its Virtualization Survey, which polled Simpana software customers worldwide to determine the key factors driving adoption of server virtualization and the major challenges associated with managing these environments.

-A total of 479 respondents underscored the continued rise in server virtualization, with 46 percent of those polled citing that between 51- and 85-percent of their total servers were virtualized while 21 percent reported successful virtualization of all or nearly all servers. VMware was listed as the virtualization platform of choice by 83 percent of those polled.

The survey revealed that the top three factors driving server virtualization decisions among the respondents are: the need for improved business cost savings and efficiencies, customer responsiveness and improved service levels. The opportunity to leverage virtualization as an alternative disaster recovery strategy was also cited.

-The majority of CommVault customers polled for this survey are running mission-critical applications on VMs in their production environment. Some industry commentary has suggested that many organizations are reluctant to deploy vital applications on virtualized infrastructures because of data protection concerns. With Simpana software, CommVault continues to address these concerns, effectively alleviating data management difficulties in virtualized environments.

According to those polled, the top three challenges relative to managing virtualized server environments include the inability to backup all virtual machines (VMs) reliably and in a timely manner, additional resource costs and administrative time due to lack of data management automation and the increased demand for corporate-wide virtualization.

AppDynamics Survey Claims Mere 14% of Companies Have Virtualized Mission-Critical Applications

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AppDynamics has announced the results of its Application Virtualization Outlook survey.

Focused on understanding enterprise efforts to virtualize business applications, the survey revealed a significant divide in the pace of adoption of virtualization for non-critical systems versus mission-critical systems.

In particular, the results show that the majority of companies have yet to move Tier 1, mission-critical applications to virtual environments. Despite widely acknowledging the benefits of virtualization, most companies noted that they need more evidence that mission-critical applications will succeed in virtual environments.

According to the survey:

Application Virtualization Experiences ‘VM Stall’

While 83 percent report they have virtualized their non-critical applications and systems, in stark contrast, only 14 percent of respondents reported that they have fully virtualized “Tier 1” applications. With regard to those mission-critical applications, respondents said they were 50 percent more likely to virtualize applications used by employees than to virtualize the applications that directly interact with customers.

People, Performance & Design Are Top Concerns

When asked about the primary obstacles preventing the virtualization of mission-critical applications, respondents cited ‘people issues’, performance and design concerns as most the common. In fact, 52 percent of companies noted that application owners have blocked the project to virtualize a Tier 1 application. At the same time, 49 percent worry that the applications aren’t designed to support virtualization and 45 percent cited concerns about performance degradation once virtualized.

Benefits Are Clear, Confidence Is Lacking

While these concerns persist, there is wide recognition that compelling benefits exist when companies virtualize mission-critical applications. 59 percent strongly agree that virtualization would result in server consolidation and related power and cooling savings, while 49 percent strongly agree that failover/disaster recovery capabilities would improve in a virtual environment. 41 percent agree that their IT agility and responsiveness to the business would improve. Yet, the majority of companies still expressed a lack of confidence that their applications could succeed in virtual environments.

For more information about the Application Virtualization Outlook survey visit their blog.

NetIQ Survey Results Reflect Lack of Virtualization Management Basics

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As the adoption rate of virtualization technology increases, organizations face new management challenges arising from hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures. While companies turn to virtualization to reduce IT expense and increase service capacity, a recent study conducted by NetIQ revealed that very few companies are taking the necessary steps to extend systems management basics to ensure application performance, service availability and end user experience across this complex hybrid environment. As a result, they risk offsetting the many benefits and ultimate cost savings virtualization technology promises.

Comprised of feedback from over 1,000 respondents within more than 800 different government, enterprise and small-to-medium organizations worldwide, only 21 percent of 759 respondents currently deploying virtualization have any kind of systems management solution for their virtual infrastructure. Overall, survey responses demonstrate that:

  • Approximately 27 percent are managing the performance and availability of their virtual systems with the same tools they utilize on their physical servers;
  • Just 17 percent are simply monitoring the virtual hardware or the operating system; and
  • Only 10 percent are proactively gauging end-user response time while 15 percent are simply considering it.

The survey also revealed that 40 percent of respondents are not reporting on the performance of their virtualized applications, hardware, operating systems, or their virtual machines in any measurable way. This prevents them from managing capacity, avoiding impending outages and collecting additional critical data that can help ensure business continuity.

By not extending application and end-user response time monitoring to virtual systems and hybrid environments, organizations have little visibility into IT service performance and limited accuracy in gauging an end users’ experience with those services. This limits the ability of IT to fulfill service level agreements (SLAs), threatens process continuity and minimizes the potential return on virtualization investments.

NetIQ

ONStor Surveys Businesses, Claims Europe Lags US In Storage Virtualization Adoption

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Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe by provider of clustered NAS solutions, ONStor, indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in both regions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years. Only 27% of European respondents are actually implementing storage virtualization today compared to 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualized server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualized storage in their data centers. In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realize operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other results from the survey:

  • 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one to two years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%
  • Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualization solution. In Europe, the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

Respondents across both continents agree that as information continues to double year on year, storage virtualization is fast becoming a business imperative.

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]