Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – A survey titled “The State of Virtualization”, finds that a majority of medium- and large-enterprise IT organizations mistakenly 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.
Additional findings from the survey comprising over 450 IT organizations across North America and Europe indicate:
- 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.
- Nearly one in four (22 percent) IT administrators admitted that they feel “locked-in” to their storage hardware provider. One third of these respondents underestimated the costs that server/desktop virtualization would have on their storage budget. Accordingly, 41 percent of the overall respondents are saddled with two or more different storage systems from the same vendor and more than 60% cannot manage their storage resources as a single pool.
- Despite the hype surrounding cloud initiatives, an overwhelming majority (73 percent) of organizations have yet to take advantage of cloud services for storage needs. However, 70 percent said access to more disk space would be the most important characteristic they would want from cloud-related storage – even more so than the disaster recovery functionality it could provide.
- 95 percent of respondents cited they are likely to deploy server/desktop virtualization software from VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix in the coming year. While Microsoft Hyper-V adoption is growing, according to respondents, VMware is still top of mind. Nearly 65 percent plan to deploy VMware, while only 10 percent have identified Hyper-V as their platform of choice.
- Almost half (48 percent) of those surveyed are now taking advantage of storage virtualization software to tackle the storage-related obstacles associated with their server and desktop virtualization initiatives. Nearly three in four (74 percent) rely on it to improve disaster recovery and business continuity practices.
“Unanticipated storage costs, availability concerns, and performance bottlenecks are the most critical factors bringing server consolidation and desktop virtualization projects to a standstill,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO of DataCore Software. “IT organizations in midsize and large organizations have turned to storage virtualization software solutions like to overcome these operational and financial challenges by better leveraging existing storage assets and standard practices.”
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. To read more about the survey results, access “The State of Virtualization and Clouds and the Impact of Storage” report.