SMEs Bask
“Impressive” Adoption Rates
Sixty-nine percent of respondents with greater than 250 terabytes (TB) of virtualized storage use or plan to deploy a hybrid storage strategy to meet storage demands of virtual servers. The survey refers to adoption rates of hybrid storage systems as “impressive” because the technology is still relatively new.
More Is Always Better
Companies that have virtualized at least 60 percent of their environment reveal a consolidation ratio (average number of virtual machines per physical server) of 16:1 or greater. In comparison, companies with 20 percent or less of their operations virtualized only achieved an 8:1 ratio or less. A higher consolidation ratio translates into lower costs and complexity.
More Apps Are Virtualized
While Websites and databases are common application targets for virtualization, the survey finds that IT professionals are increasing virtualization of more specialized applications, including procurement, accounting and financial management. While this virtualization is occurring at a faster rate at SMEs that have 40 percent or more of their IT infrastructure virtualized, adoption rates are rising at companies with less than 40 percent of their organizations virtualized.
Seeking Better Awareness
Although virtualization tools such as VMware’s vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) are said to deliver significant performance and management benefits—speed improvements of up to 80 percent in management operations—80 percent of respondents with less than 20 percent of the data center virtualized didn’t have a clue about VAAI. In comparison, about 50 percent of respondents who have virtualized 80 to 100 percent of their environments use VAAI or are considering it.
Everybody Likes Virtualization
While it’s not uncommon for large enterprises to have strategic deployment of virtualization, the survey finds that midmarket companies are increasingly adopting the technology. The majority of respondents who work at companies with 100 to 1,000 employees have virtualized environments that range from less than 25TB to more than 1 petabyte (PB) of total storage.
What Do IT Professionals Want?
According to the survey, they want to increase storage capacity and improve performance. The number-one priority of survey respondents centers on improving storage performance via increased storage capacity and the use of hybrid storage. This also entails reducing I/O bottlenecks between virtual machines and storage, improving manageability of virtualized environments and increasing their consolidation ratios.
Virtualization Gobbles Up Flash Storage, SSDs
Companies of all sizes are increasing their deployment of flash storage and solid-state drives (SSDs) under hypervisors to help increase system performance and maintain cost efficiencies—the key drivers behind the virtualization trend. About 35 percent of respondents with greater than 250TB of storage, and more than 15 percent of respondents with less than 250TB of storage in their virtualized environments are adding hybrid storage solutions, including SSDs and hard-disk drives (HDDs).
Selecting Vendors by Performance and Price
Respondents with greater than 250TB of virtualized storage reveal that highest possible performance, price/performance and unified storage systems are the most important factors—in that order—when selecting storage vendors. For respondents with less than 250TB of virtualized storage, price/performance ranks number one, followed by highest possible performance and unified storage systems.
Fibre Channel Rules
Survey respondents overwhelmingly choose Fibre Channel as their interconnect of choice for virtualized storage. This was followed by iSCSI (35 percent), 1 Gigabit Ethernet (29 percent), 10GbE (24 percent), and several others (all ranked in the single digits).
VMware Tops Hypervisor Likes for Virtualization
Sixty-four percent of respondents use VMware VSphere 5 for virtualization, followed by VMware vSphere 4, according to 33 percent of respondents. However, the survey also finds that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is gaining ground. Twenty-four percent of respondents said they are using Hyper-V, followed by 18 percent using Citrix Xen.