Study Says Virtualization "Staggering" IT Departments
VMworld Day 1, Early Edition: According to a new survey released this morning, IT shops are "staggering" under the heavy load of managing the unbridled growth of virtual machines and the applications running on them. The survey, which was done by Reflex Systems and filled out by some 300 enterprise IT managers, certainly doesn't come as a surprise to IT pros, who are always on the front lines when it comes to accommodating new technologies.
No doubt, the evolution of virtualization and cloud computing is based on rapid proliferation, and as the survey notes, 53 percent of respondents say that more than 50 percent of their business-critical apps are slated for virtualization before the conclusion of 2010, which represents a 17 percent increased over the current numbers. "This shows the rapid rate of virtualization by the enterprise," Reflex says.
The challenges faced by survey respondents over the next six months are the same faced by many VMware customers as they gear up to virtualize their datacenters and streamline their application development capabilities. The bad news here is that storage and management are major -- and very expensive -- problems that are increasingly consuming customer resources. The good news is that a growing number of companies are dedicated to offloading the emerging storage and management burdens.
Speaking of issues most mentioned, the survey goes on to note, "Respondents further cited performance, security and auditing/reporting as the major reasons for looking for virtualization tools, in addition to those tools provided by hypervisor vendors."
Getting back to the burden virtualization is putting on the already overloaded shoulders of IT departments, the survey reports that respondents most frequently mentioned capacity planning, performance and troubleshooting in virtual environments as the top three tasks that consume the most "significant resources" leading to virtualization sprawl.
"As a result, 35% ranked network visibility, including traffic flow, monitoring and usage as the number one capability they are looking for in their virtualization management." Other features enterprise virtualization customers are looking for include access control and audit of user actions within systems."
Virtualization is great stuff. But nobody said it was going to be easy.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/30/2010 at 12:48 PM