How Companies Manage Virtual Servers, Desktops, and Storage ?

With the rapid spread of virtualization over the past few years from a development tool running on the desktop to an essential component of IT infrastructure strategy, companies are increasingly adopting virtualization as a technology to increase desktop, server and storage utilization. In the new research benchmark report entitled Virtual Strategies: Managing Servers, Desktops and Storage for Infrastructure Efficiency by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company, over 175 organizations identified that virtualization can be a key enabler in a strategy of infrastructure or data consolidation, as well as provide reduced operating costs and increased infrastructure efficiency.

Among the IT organization surveyed, Best-in-Class companies (those ranked in the top 20% of all organizations) shared the following performance characteristics in regards to virtualization:

• 73% have a formal process for moving virtualized applications from testing and development to production
• 92% have administrators trained in managing virtual servers, storage, or desktops
• 65% have an understanding about which applications will benefit from being virtualized

Best-in-Class organizations are 78% more likely than Laggard firms (the lower 30% of firms surveyed) to meet data service-level agreements (SLAs) after virtualization and have implemented a closed loop warranty management system and are 26% more likely to have retired physical servers due to virtualization.

"Virtualization has benefits in consolidating servers and applications, but can also enable an activity that is critical to business survival, that of disaster recovery," states Jeffrey Hill, senior research analyst, Aberdeen. "Virtualization helps make a disaster recovery infrastructure easier to implement and more affordable. This is of particular interest to smaller companies who may not have the IT expertise or capability to do more than traditional data backups."