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IDC Research Shows Strong Server Virtualization Adoption in Europe

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According to ONStor, Europe’s lagging in storage virtualization adoption. Recent research from IDC, however, shows the pace of adoption of virtualized servers is incredibly rapid among organizations that are using virtualization, with 35% of servers purchased in 2007 being virtualized and 52% of those bought in 2008 expected to be so. 54% of those not using virtualization expect to do so in the next 18 months.

“Virtualization use has exploded since our last survey of the European market,” said Chris Ingle, consulting and research director, IDC’s Systems Group. “Both large organizations and smaller businesses are using the technology for a wider range of applications and for business critical projects. As use of virtualization grows the challenges around managing complexity, finding skills and software licensing become more apparent”

Further Findings Include:

  • Organizations are increasing their virtualization of x86 systems for core business applications, although the majority of virtualization is still for test and development and for network server applications. Expertise and skills are the biggest barrier to virtualization adoption.
  • Growth of virtualization as a strategy remains strong, rising from 46% of the base to 54%. What is interesting is that virtualization is growing as a datacenter strategy in itself rather than as part of other projects. This supports the view that virtualization is increasingly seen as a standard for a wide range of workloads.
  • VMware is the clear market leader in providing virtualization technology with 82% of the sample using VMware. Despite high levels of Linux use, only 3% of the sample were using Xen as their virtualization platform. Microsoft was used by 13% of the sample base with various Unix technologies and mainframe accounting for 14%.
  • 59% of implementations have fewer than four VMs or partitions per physical box. The largest growth area for virtualization use over the past year, particularly in small and medium businesses, is improving disaster recovery, backup, and enhancing availability.
  • Availability of skills and application vendor licensing are the factors causing most problems for virtualization users. 23% of virtualization users report that their application vendors’ licensing is still not meeting their needs and 33% of large businesses report that it limits use of virtualization.
  • Despite seeing virtualization as a vital tool for their business, the majority of organizations do not measure benefits and use virtual infrastructure in the same way they do physical infrastructure.

The IDC study was first carried out in 2007 and has been repeated in Q1 2008 with a larger sample of organizations and a wider range of questions.

Microsoft Survey: Why Retailers Are Adopting Virtualization

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71 % of U.S. retailers are turning to a broad set of virtualization solutions as a means to save costs, maximize space and generally gain better control of their IT infrastructures, reports a new survey released today by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s “Virtualization in Retail Survey 2008”, conducted by independent Washington-based research firm KRC Research, found that nearly half of the participating retailers (49 %) are employing one form of virtualization within their store locations based on cost savings, while 46 % are seeking to better respond to issues and failures of applications and systems, and 43 % chose virtualization solutions to help them save space.

“Decades of installing servers, operating systems, applications, middleware and databases have taken their toll, as retailers are nearing their limits for physical space, power usage and cooling,” said Geoff Thomas, general manager of Microsoft’s U.S. Retail and Hospitality Group. “For a chain with 1,000 stores or more, adding just one more server or application per store is a significant investment. That is why virtualization is an attractive alternative, as more than 50 percent of retailers surveyed had between three and 10 servers in each of their stores already.”

Key findings of the survey included the following:

  • Seventy-one percent of the retail companies surveyed are using virtualization technologies to isolate applications, data, operating system instances or transaction services in their stores or headquarters.
  • Thirty-five percent of survey respondents cited using virtualization technology to make it easier to centralize deployment and ongoing management of applications. This ease of deployment is critical in today’s complex and competitive environments as retailers are striving to quickly use real-time information in such emerging store technologies as kiosks, self-service checkouts, mobile handheld devices, electronic signage and even computerized shopping carts.
  • Thirty-one percent pointed to energy savings as driving their purchase of virtualization technology. The rising awareness of “green” energy initiatives, as well as the increasing power required to run and cool data centers, likely factored into this response.
  • Thirty-eight percent of survey respondents cited the need to provide centralized security as a driver toward implementing virtualization within its stores or remote locations.
  • Among the 29 percent of retail respondents who are not using virtualization to isolate operating system instances, applications, data or transaction services, one-quarter (25 percent) say their company is considering it. Among those not considering implementing virtualization technologies, more than half say the main reason is cost (51 percent).

Microsoft’s “Virtualization in Retail Survey 2008” was conducted via telephone by KRC Research from Feb. 21 to March 10, 2008, and included responses from 205 interviews in the United States with technology decision-makers who have IT management responsibilities for store locations or regional or national headquarters for retail companies with annual revenues of $250 million or more.

[Source: WinBeta]