Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Virtualization ramp up is real - IDC

October 18, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization ramp up is real - IDC

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Enterprise technology managers are moving toward virtual servers and vendors are following the trend, IDC says in a new report out Tuesday.

Spending on virtualization is expected to reach almost $15 billion worldwide by 2009, the research and consulting company says.

Customers are adopting virtualized servers - partitioning smaller 2-4 way x86 systems, using software developed specifically for the volume server space - in an attempt to contain costs, leverage existing IT resources, and handle growing workloads.

"Growth is particularly strong in the volume server space," said Matt Eastwood, vice president of IDC's Worldwide Server research. "The risky, higher value IT projects, once reserved for more scalable servers, are now being addressed by lower-cost alternatives."

The ability to host multiple applications per server and create a tiered-architecture "within-a-box" is driving server virtualization adoption and will continue to affect future hardware deployments, IDC says.

"For many years IBM has been the perceived leader in server virtualization with its mainframe legacy. Now that virtualization is undergoing broad adoption in the volume server markets. Vendors such as HP and Dell are well positioned to garner significant market share in this space," said Michelle Bailey, director of Enterprise Server research at IDC.

Additional findings from this study include:
* IDC estimates that more than three-quarters of all companies with more than 500 employees are deploying virtual servers.

* Customer satisfaction is high. Survey respondents currently using server virtualization technologies says they expect 45 percent of new servers purchased next year will be virtualized.

* More than 50 percent of all virtual servers are running production-level applications, including the most business critical workloads.

* Unix, S390, and OS400 systems account for the bulk of customer spending on virtualized servers today. However, rapid growth is occurring on Windows and Linux servers.

Posted by Jack McCarthy on October 18, 2005 01:43 PM

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