Most Cos Feel Their Environments Not Virtualised Enough: Survey

TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, released its latest Servers and Virtualization Study, indicating a major refresh of x86 server infrastructure and the associated network, storage and software technologies required to optimise performance in virtualised, cloud-ready datacentres. Conducted during the second half of 2012, TheInfoPro study identifies key initiatives of senior server infrastructure managers and examines market factors and major players. This annual study is based on extensive live interviews with server professionals and primary decision-makers at large and midsize enterprises in North America and Europe.

Highlights from the TheInfoPro Servers and Virtualisation Study include:

• Server virtualisation projects are still driving activity and spending across much of the IT marketplace, with less than a third of respondents considering their environments to be sufficiently virtualised.

• The majority of respondents are undertaking a major refresh of their x86 server infrastructures together with the network and storage technologies that are required to optimise performance in virtualised, cloud-ready datacentres.

• In the x86 environment, which represents more than 80 percent of respondents’ computing capacity, average virtualisation levels have increased 13 percent from last year to 51 percent, with a notable increase at the higher levels, roughly doubling the number of organisations virtualising production applications.

• The complexity and interdependency of storage, network, server and software in virtualised environments is driving interest in ‘integrated infrastructure’ solutions, which include unified computing and converged and appliance-oriented infrastructure. In these categories, general-purpose offerings – especially those that are composed of multivendor components – are gaining favor, with offerings from Cisco and its array of partners being the most widely mentioned by respondents.

• From the software perspective, attention is switching from base virtualisation capabilities to the automation tools required to manage production workloads in virtualised environments: service catalogs, usage-based reporting and accounting (show-back), service-level monitoring tools and runbook or script-based automation and provisioning.

• With most organisations embroiled in virtualising business-critical production workloads, it is hardly surprising that vendors closely associated with the technologies required to build cloud-ready, virtualised datacentres top the list of exciting vendors. This strongly favors VMware as the dominant virtualisation provider for x86-based infrastructure, and Cisco for hardware vendors. Both vendors also top TheInfoPro customer ratings for promise and fulfillment.

“Server virtualisation projects are still dominating IT activity, creating a one-time spending bubble as organisations lay down the foundation for a cloud-ready infrastructure,” said Peter ffoulkes, TheInfoPro’s Research Director for Servers and Virtualisation. “Complexity is driving interest in converged infrastructure solutions, with 13 percent of respondents planning to implement the technology for the first time within the next two years.”