New Surveys Show Scalability and Backup Recovery as Key in Virtualisation Adoption - So Why the Hesitancy?

News provided by

Diskeeper Corporation Europe

22 Jun, 2011, 10:22 GMT

LONDON, June 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

A survey conducted by Symantec on 3,700 information technology managers in 35 countries, entitled "Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud" revealed key points in what benefits businesses expect from implementing a virtual strategy. While there were many findings, some specific findings also showed two-thirds of enterprises list performance degradation as a somewhat/extremely large factor in their hesitation to place business-critical applications into a private cloud.

An excerpt from the Symantec whitepaper stated performance can be a factor that either drives virtualization or inhibits it. While virtualization/cloud computing can help streamline operations and save money, sacrificing performance is not an option. Any gains in other areas will be negated if customers and employees are unable to work within a fast, secure environment that provides maximum uptime. Among organizations that have implemented storage virtualization, 84 percent of respondents stated that one of their goals in doing so was to improve storage performance or speed. In contrast, two-thirds of enterprises list performance degradation as a somewhat/extremely large factor in their hesitation to place business-critical applications into a private cloud.

One key question in the survey asked how important the following goals were at the time of implementing server virtualisation and showed the following:

  • 88% said somewhat/completely important to improve the scalability of our servers
  • 87% said somewhat/completely important to reduce expenses
  • 85% said somewhat/completely important to improve up-time and availability
  • 83% said somewhat/completely important to improve recovery readiness
  • 83% said somewhat/completely important to improve server speed

This hesitancy to fully implement a virtual environment is very much highlighted in another survey which was published in a whitepaper sponsored by EMC and carried out in conjunction with Computing.

  • 5% have virtualised 96-100% of their IT infrastructure
  • 17% have virtualised 70-95% of their IT infrastructure
  • 16% have virtualised 50-69% of their IT infrastructure
  • 21% have virtualised 30-49% of their IT infrastructure
  • 16% have virtualised 10-29% of their IT infrastructure
  • 10% have virtualised 10% of their IT infrastructure
  • 15% have virtualised none of their IT infrastructure

The above statistics show that companies are only gradually going to a virtual environment, and by doing so hope to reduce expenses, improve scalability, improve performance and increase disaster recovery preparedness.

Technical Presales Consultant at Diskeeper Corporation Europe, Mandeep Birdi comments "From these statistics we know virtualisation to some degree is now very much a part of many organisations, but whilst implementing server virtualization, IT management need to also consider ways to ensure optimal performance in their virtual infrastructure. A major problem inherent in virtual infrastructures is that windows based virtual machines can generate  excess I/Os as a result of fragmentation This unfortunately results in large performance drops on the host through these unnecessary I/Os and this can impact the success of the migrations. Our software solution, V-locity® virtual platform disk optimiser was specifically developed to address this issue."

About Diskeeper Corporation - Microsoft Gold Partner

Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies®: CIOs, IT Managers and System Administrators of Global Fortune 1000 and Forbes 500 enterprises rely on Diskeeper® performance software to provide unparalleled performance and reliability to their business laptops, desktops and servers. Diskeeper 2011 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite® fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity[®]2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware ESX and Hyper-V eliminates the barriers to full virtual efficiency and maximum I/O performance on virtual servers. Diskeeper Corporation further provides real-time data protection and real-time data recovery with Undelete® data recovery software (http://www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking® technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (http://www.invisitasking.com).