Survey Shows Increasing Interest in Virtualization

Becky writes, "74 percent of those surveyed (88 percent in the U.S.) ranked servers as the most important area for virtualization, followed by storage (60 percent worldwide/63 percent U.S.), applications (49 percent worldwide/54 percent U.S.) and the entire enterprise/data center (43 percent for both)."

This, of course, isn't surprising, but it is nice to see some hard data confirming that server virtualization continues to be the point of entry for most into the virtualization arena. Storage virtualization isn't that far behind, though, as IT admins and managers realize that server virtualization works hand-in-hand with storage virtualization. You can have one without the other, but like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, they're much better together.

Another reason server virtualization remains at the top is that it has the easiest ROI story: calculate how much a new physical server costs, find out how many fewer you'll need through virtualization, and multiply. Infrastructure, manpower, and other savings through virtualization are harder to quantify (but getting easier.)

The results, overall, show an encouraging trend in sophistication among the IT crowd. They're starting to understand that there's much more to virtualization than just server consolidation.

Posted by Keith Ward on 02/12/2008 at 12:48 PM