Virtualization Survey Identifies Storage Obstacles to Virtualizing Critical Business Apps and Flash memory SSD technology Trends

This week DataCore Software’s Third Annual State of Virtualization Survey  findings were published; 477 IT professionals from a broad range of industries participated in the survey conducted at the end of March 2013. 

What was surprising?

Surprisingly, nearly one in three respondents said they are still avoiding virtualization projects altogether because the related storage concerns and costs are too high.

Despite the incredible attention the industry is placing on solid state technologies and Cloud storage, there are major issues impacting wider adoption:

• Integration difficulties associated with Flash memory and solid state disks (SSDs) rank high among the factors discouraging organizations from applying these fast technologies to their most latency-sensitive virtualized business workloads and desktop virtualization (VDI) programs.
• One in two respondents said they are not planning to use Flash/SSD for their virtualization projects.
• When asked about what classes of storage they are using across their environments, nearly six in 10 respondents said they aren’t using Flash/SSD at all.
• Organizations are not flocking to public cloud storage in droves for their storage needs. Eight in 10 said they are not using any public cloud storage. This is particularly notable given the amount of recent attention devoted to public cloud options.

What was not surprising?

Storage continues to be the biggest chunk of the investment in virtualization projects. These include both server and desktop initiatives.

• 52 percent of those surveyed said storage accounted for more than 25 percent of their virtualization budget.
• Storage virtualization software use is growing.

Organizations are still eager to virtualize their mission critical applications, but the findings point out that storage-related costs and I/O performance issues remain significant obstacles to their benefiting from these virtualization initiatives. The results revealed that SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle and SAP represent the most prevalent Tier-1 business applications targeted for consolidation. These popular business applications are also the most storage intensive applications and therefore the hardest and costliest to virtualize due to the level of storage needed to ensure that their demanding performance and availability requirements are met.

• 44 percent of respondents said the disproportionate storage-related costs were a “serious obstacle” or “somewhat of an obstacle” preventing them from virtualizing more of their workloads. 42 percent of respondents said the same about performance degradation or inability to meet performance expectations.
• IT storage budgets are on a relatively tight leash in 2013 compared to 2012. More than half (51 percent) of respondents said their storage budget has remained stable, but 20 percent said their storage budget has been reduced, compared to just 14 percent in 2012. While 38 percent said their storage budget grew in 2012, only 30 percent said the same this year.

IT professionals from organizations across the globe participated in the survey, with;
56 percent of respondents from organizations with less than 1,000 employees;
23 percent of respondents from organizations with 1,000 to 5,000 employees and;
21 percent of respondents from organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

Respondents represented a range of industries, including Financial Services (11 percent), Healthcare (12 percent), Government (13 percent), Manufacturing (15 percent), Education (13 percent) and IT services (14 percent). The average capacity managed by these organizations was 234 terabytes.

DataCore's 2013 State of Virtualization Survey was conducted at the end of March 2013. The survey asked a series of questions about virtualization and its impact on storage.
The full report may be found here: http://pages.datacore.com/StateofVirtualizationSurvey.html