Newsletter

Data Centers Heading for Virtualization

If you are considering virtualization for your data center, you have company. An April 8-15 ChangeWave corporate spending trends survey shows a deterioration in second quarter software purchases with little relief in sight. But there's good news on the virtualization front with noticeably robust findings for VMware and suggestions of increased sales for Citrix.

A total of 1,956 respondents involved with software spending in their company participated in the survey. A total of one-in-four respondents (25%) said their company planned to spend less for software over the next 90 days — 3-points lower than ChangeWave’s previous survey in January. A miniscule 12% say their company will spend more — down 4 points from the earlier results.

As you might expect, the economic woes are behind the software entrenchment. A total of 13% cite "a general slowdown in business conditions and capital budgets" as responsible for curtailing their company's software spending — 4 points higher than in the January poll and double the percentage of six months ago.

But on the bright side, the survey does show increased corporate spending for virtualization software (Net Score = +5), with VMware strengthening its domination over this market. So far this year, VMware's share has risen 12 percentage points in ChangeWave’s surveys (from 58% in January to 70% currently).

Why is virtualization catching on now? Practically speaking, virtualization has been part of IT for decades, permitting a user to run multiple jobs on mainframe systems or hide the peculiarities of individual hard drives in a storage system. But after an uneven history outside the mainframe environment, virtualization technology is maturing and helps fix some common problems.

Nowadays, virtualization on the server level permits users to replace several inefficient servers with a single server running multiple virtual machines. Just for this purpose alone, the cost savings in budget-starved data centers is visible. Now there are grander visualization visions — applications, files, storage — that ease availability of information and best use of scarce resources.