Data centre costs top reason for virtualisation

Nine out of 10 organisations that have adopted virtualisation technologies have done so to reduce data centre costs, according to research from IDC.

Of those organisations surveyed, almost half said they see virtualisation as standard for new application deployment now or within "a few years".

silicon.com Classics

Want the best of silicon.com from the past 10 years? Look no further…

1. The best of Google Earth

2. Digital Blunders

3. A London pub crawl… with wi-fi on the side

4. 10 weird uses for an iPod

5. 10 hard drive disasters

6. The iPod and BlackBerry lost property mountain

7. 30 tips for better business travel

8. The Peeping Tom phone filter

9. 'Nigerian' money scam - What happens when you reply?

10. The 10 craziest uses of RFID

IDC conducted the survey of 650 European companies between January and March of this year. One of the sponsors of the research was virtualisation-software supplier VMware.

The survey claims "virtualisation is mainstream and is becoming a standard deployment platform for applications in data centres around Europe", according to Chris Ingle, research director for IDC's European systems group. "Customers across the region are running core business applications, test and development and business continuity systems on virtual infrastructure."

The pace of virtualisation uptake has "increased a lot over the last two years", according to Ingle. "In 2007, 35 per cent of data centres had some form of virtualisation in place. It will be 52 per cent this year."

Virtualisation is not only popular with large corporations, it is catching on among medium-sized companies as well, according to Ingle: "Medium-sized companies are a bit behind, as you would expect, but not by much."

However, IDC said that virtualisation does pose some issues for IT managers to think about before adoption. These issues are largely to do with managing virtualised systems. In its survey, IDC asked IT organisations how they managed their virtual estates. Ingle said: "The answer was: they don't," he said this is an important lapse. "If you don't measure it, you have problems measuring the value you are getting."

Some of the problems involved in measuring returns from virtualised estates arise from the fact many of the tools for measuring IT performance and return are designed for physical environments, said Ingle. However, he added that the necessary tools are quickly becoming available in the virtualised world.

VMware is still the comfortable leader in the virtualisation market, with 82 per cent of European companies that have adopted virtualisation using VMware software, according to the IDC survey.

Original article: Cutting datacentre costs main driver for virtualisation from ZDNet UK