Majority of British business planning to go virtual

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 19:53

Business IT - Technology

A new survey reveals that 38 percent of British business has already adopted virtualised infrastructures, and of those who have not some 52 percent are planning to do so.

Research carried out by the organisers of Storage Expo 2008 along with Double-Take Software has revealed, somewhat unsurprisingly, that there is an overwhelming interest in business virtualisation.

As well as those headline findings that 38 percent of respondents have already virtualised their production infrastructure, and 52 percent are planning to do so, the key motivating factors behind the decision to virtualise were exposed.

These turned out to be, again with very little in the shock and awe department to be fair, the daring due of flexibility and cost.

Increased infrastructure flexibility was cited as the main benefit of adopting virtualisation by some 48 percent taking part in the survey. This was followed, not so closely, by 21 percent citing cost reduction.

If you look beyond the core factors, and I guess that given this was a survey conducted ahead of a storage expo in conjunction with a business continuity software specialist you had to see it coming, we are told that improved disaster recovery was also important.

In fact, I am assured that it is "widely considered a key additional benefit of virtualisation" with an overwhelming 82 percent of those taking part stating that it was a significant feature.

Ian Masters, UK sales and marketing director at Double-Take Software, says that "although 82 percent of respondents believe that improved disaster recovery is a key additional benefit of virtualisation, Double-Take Software maintains that it is not an automatic by-product."

He then went on to swing things round to how virtualised systems rely on the physical hardware that shared data is stored upon, and if they fail then virtualised systems also fail. You would be right in thinking that Double-Take has data replication products to sell here.

However, once you get past that and focus on the core findings the survey does seem to reiterate that the dramatic adoption rates for virtualisation over the last few years is showing no sign of slowing down yet.

In fact, the event manager for Storage Expo 2008, Natalie Booth reckons that "from our discussions with CIOs and analysts we expect this trend to accelerate."