On the first day of Interop, we joined together with NetQoS to poll 117 Interop attendees and gauge where they stood with emerging technologies. Fifty percent of the respondents were C-level or IT management. The surprise with the polling wasn’t that virtualization is popular, but rather the strong expected rate of adoption.
44% of respondents said that at least 20 percent of their applications run on virtual machines, while a sizable portion (40%) said they don’t have virtual machines. A small portion ran over half their applications on virtual machines.
The expected adoption rate of virtualization was much stronger than I expected. In two years the number of organizations without virtualization is projected to shrink from 40% to around 5%. The second area of growth came with the number of businesses running more than half of their applications on virtual machines. This number is expected to increase from 7% of organizations to nearly 40% by 2010.
Overall, 51% of organizations use virtualization, and this should rise to 83% within two years. I’d be curious to learn of other studies that project the virtualization adoption rate to understand how in line the results were.
Another question asked respondents to identify the emerging technology they think will be the greatest monitoring challenge. 38% of IT executives identified virtualization as the greatest monitoring challenge, followed by unified communications (24%) and MPLS (14%). In this case we didn’t delve into the “why” but it may point to an analysis need. For those involved in virtualization, it’d be great to hear feedback and thoughts on the numbers.
Virtualization Resources
Virtualization Report – InfoWorld’s David Marshall
Virtualization Daily – Virtualization detailed by the CEO of JumpBox
SearchServerVirtualization.com – Tech Target site focused on virtualization in the data center
Tags: interop, network monitoring, virtual machines, virtualization adoption, virtualization monitoring
May 9, 2008 at 9:18 am |
Not surprised by these numbers at all. We’ve been doing surveys on this at FOSE (government IT show) last year and this year and Interop NY last fall. http://blog.sciencelogic.com/whats-in-a-number/04/25/2008/
Virtualization was near the top of the list of importance but what was clear by the gap between plans and actual adoption (and from the conversations we had) was that there was a lot of confusion and “wait and see” attitude about what tools to use to manage virtual environments. Same conclusions came out of the Interop Unconference discussion on virtualization monitoring – virtualization as a technology is still maturing and the tools around it are trying to catch up to even that level.
May 12, 2008 at 12:07 pm |
[...] come and gone and looking forward to sharing some interesting polls and stats we have uncovered. Network Instruments and NetQoS also conducted a poll on virtualization at Interop, which found that 80% of attendees [...]