November 18, 2009 -- Everyone is on board the virtualization train and it seems IT vendors are slapping the "cloud" tag on every storage platform and service they come up with, but what drives the end user towards virtualization and cloud storage?
Recent research from IT automation specialist Shavlik Technologies outlines the market drivers behind virtualization and cloud computing initiatives. Shavlik conducted a survey of more than 290 IT pros and the results reveal that data, server and licensing consolidation and disaster recovery functionality are the leading drivers behind new investments in virtualization technology.
According to Shavlik, an overwhelming 93% of IT organizations are using virtual machine technology. Seventy-five percent of those organizations have more than half of their production servers as virtual machines.
Fifty-three percent of survey respondents say server and licensing consolidation is the driving force behind their virtualization deployments, while backup ranked as the second major driver, reported by 52% of those polled.
The principal lure of cloud computing seems to be TCO. The survey revealed that the reduced IT costs associated with cloud computing is the principal reason IT managers are turning to the cloud for the delivery of IT services.
Cloud computing is being examined for adoption by 58 percent of survey respondents, according to the Shavlik research.
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Good intro here Kevin. As you suggest, few technologies have such the immediate positive ROI that virtualization offers because of reduced acquisition and maintenance costs. We're seeing two other drivers for the cloud that may not be quite so obvious.
First, there is a compelling high availability or HA advantage from virtualizing the physical tie between application and hardware. As applications are virtualized they can be restarted on other hardware dynamically. For users, applications are then self-healing in the event of hardware failures. This is a benefit for integrators chartered with support of these systems as well.
The second driver is the ability to move applications between physical servers for performance load-balancing or to smooth maintenance activites.
Most users implicitly expect cloud infrastructures to support HA and load balancing. Virtualization brings these features without complex, expensive clustered interconnects.
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