Confidence in virtualisation soars

A lack of expertise in working with today’s relatively immature virtualised environments is holding back wider adoption of the technology, yet there is a growing confidence in virtualisation’s role as a platform for mission-critical applications.

Questioning 360 of its customers in a recent online survey, managed hosting provider Rackspace found that 57% were using virtualisation in some form within their organisation, with VMware the product of choice for almost two thirds.

The chief benefits they reported were increased flexibility (35%) and lower costs (31%). But the list of respondents’ obstacles to wider adoption was long and varied: a lack of expertise (26%), the immaturity of virtualisation technology (21%), difficulties in managing and administrating virtualised environments (19%), security concerns (13%) and anxieties around scalability (13%).

Perceptions seem to be based on the degree of user exposure to virtualisation technologies: 40% of respondents claimed to have gained a deep understanding of virtualisation in-house; but among organisations with less experience, two thirds said they would feel more comfortable deploying through a third-party hosting service.

Meanwhile, confidence in virtualisation technologies themselves is rising: 72% of respondents said they would be happy to run their mission-critical, production applications on a virtualisation platform.

Some workloads are regarded as particularly apt for virtualisation. Asked what applications are best-suited when applying virtualisation in-house, the top two environments were identified as testing/development (27%) and web applications (22%). Others mentioned included application serving (12%), file/print serving (11%), ‘traditional IT’ (8%) and databases (6%). When the same question was asked about hosted virtual environments, the responses varied markedly. Web applications took the top spot with a massive 40% of the vote, followed by application server (19%) and testing/development (17%).

 

 

 

 

Pete Swabey

Pete Swabey

Pete was Editor of Information Age and head of technology research for Vitesse Media plc from 2005 to 2013, before moving on to be Senior Editor and then Editorial Director at The Economist Intelligence...

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