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

LONDON, June 22, 2011 -

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
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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
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InvisiTasking^® technology enables any process to run
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Contact: Dorian Culmer, Email: d.culmer at diskeeper.co.uk
Phone: +44(0)1293-763-060