Storage Costs Dilute Benefits of Server Virtualization

Coraid Inc. announced the results of a survey of 254 storage and IT administrators in mid- to large-size enterprises covering a variety of industries including healthcare, education, high technology, government, media and hosting.

The findings suggest that the high cost of storage purchases is diluting the benefits of sever virtualization.

The Coraid survey asked respondents to rate how the cost of their storage investments compared to their investments in server virtualization software. A total of 54 percent responded that the ratio of the cost of storage to the cost of server virtualization software was three to one or higher. What is more, 62 percent paid a whopping $2,000 or more per terabyte of storage for their last server virtualization project.

The survey also asked respondents which storage technology they planned on deploying for public or private cloud projects in 2011. By a ratio of nearly four to one, survey respondents preferred Ethernet SAN (AoE protocol) to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

"The benefits of server virtualization are both financially and operationally compelling," said Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid. "Unfortunately, advances in the computing layer of the data center, with x86 servers and virtualization, have not been matched at the network and storage layers. In fact, this latest survey shows the negative impact that legacy storage is having on the economics of the virtual data center. The good news is that Ethernet SAN is rapidly emerging as an alternative to costly, complex Fibre Channel storage technologies that grew out of the mainframe era."

"Coraid’s survey findings are consistent with what we are seeing in the data center," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Our data shows that the implementation of server virtualization inevitably and invariably requires substantial upgrades to existing storage infrastructures. Specifically, storage groups find themselves adding new or additional networked storage and designing for higher IO and throughput densities in order to respond to the stresses and demands that server virtualization places upon them. There is, however, a little-discussed ‘dirty little secret’ behind the technology curtain: in many cases, the cost of upgrading to faster storage systems can negate a large portion of the savings enabled by virtualization."

Survey Methodology
The survey asked for the opinions of storage and IT professionals in organizations conducting business in the U.S. Respondents ranged from small and medium enterprises with under $10 million in revenue to large enterprises with more than $1 billion in revenue.