Virtualisation take-up defies economic downturn

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 11:59

IT Industry - Market

Australia has the fastest uptake and penetration of server virtualisation in the Asia-Pacific region, and the depressed economy has “done little to stifle the uptake”, according to the latest report from industry analysts, IDC.

In its data centres and virtualisation report just published, IDC says that the initial uptake of virtualisation in the Australian market was centred around server and operating system consolidation, however, it says that “many businesses are deploying virtualisation in more sophisticated roles such as desktop virtualisation, business continuity and disaster recovery,” and that more recently this has extended to dynamic IT and internal cloud computing.

And, according to Matthew Oostveen, services research manager at IDC, technologies like virtualised, multicore blade chassis have increased the complexity of infrastructure, and “end users are finding this increase in complexity is driving them to adopt additional services to ensure business continuity and service levels are maintained.

“This is particularly disruptive in the Australian market place which is a text book example of a small and medium business driven economy. These small and medium sized businesses do not have the same level of technical expertise that large enterprises have in their IT departments and are less able to keep up with the rapid increase in technical intricacy.”

Oostveen said that the impact of this amplification in complexity is the need for many businesses to externally source skills to maintain their business systems, which he said translates into an increasing reliance on dependable service arrangements with increasing levels of coverage.

"While virtualisation is the darling of the infrastructure market, questions are being raised about its suitability for mission critical computing. The fundamental driver behind virtualisation has been to increase server utilisation, however, research shows that in virtualised environments, as utilisation increases, stability decreases.”

According to Oostveen, old habits die hard, and he cautions that server virtualisation requires CIOs to remain vigilant with the acquisition of new server infrastructure and not return to the “buying patterns of old which caused the oversupply of underutilised servers.
 
"One thing is certain, in a lacklustre economy virtualisation activity has continued and helped increase the average selling value of servers. Servers destined for virtualised environments are more richly configured and of a higher spec than non-virtualised counterparts."