2/3 of Business-Critical Applications Expected to Be Virtualized in Twelve Months

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced the results of a survey
of 476 enterprise IT professionals regarding their current experiences
with and future expectations for virtualizing business-critical
applications.

55% of respondents have virtualized half or more
of their business-critical applications, and that number will increase
to 66% in the next 12 months.

While these results validate the
future adoption of virtualization, respondents cited budget (54%),
inadequate IT infrastructure (49%), and insufficient virtualization
skill set and application knowledge (46%) as barriers to their plans for
virtualization.
 
Key Challenges
Budget remains the
largest challenge to adopting virtualization and has a compounding
effect on other challenges. Insufficient infrastructure and inadequate
skill set were the next top challenges reported by respondents. When
asked about specific infrastructure issues experienced when virtualizing
critical business applications the respondents were divided.
Fifty-four% cited either, storage performance and scalability or network
infrastructure issues as the leading IT infrastructure challenges.

Key Motivators
The survey revealed an unwavering motivation to adopt and deploy virtualization despite the challenges faced.

Respondents indicated
the top benefits behind this trend:

• 61% indicated cost savings
• 60% indicated greater flexibility
• 45% indicated agility or time to deploy
• 48% indicated higher availability

In
addition to these drivers, better scalability was listed as a key
benefit of virtualizing business-critical applications by 33% of
respondents.

Additional Key Survey Findings
Databases
such as SQL Server proved to be the top virtualized workload today, with
72% of respondents virtualizing some or all of their databases.
Messaging applications such as Microsoft Exchange are the second
most-virtualized applications, according to 51% of respondents.
Collaboration and application servers followed closely behind, with half
the respondents virtualizing some or all of these workloads.
 
The
survey also shows a growing trust in the performance and maturity of
virtualization technologies for critical data. When asked how they store
and serve application data storage, 60% of respondents indicated they
did it through the hypervisor (e.g., VMDK/VHD, RDM), relying on the
virtualization layer to handle data storage.

Additionally,
the survey revealed a reliance on host-based backup processes for
protecting critical application data. 70% of respondents reported that
they still rely on host-based backup processes in some form. The good
news for virtualization adoption is that almost half of respondents are
also using VM-consistent snapshots, which improves recovery time and
recovery point objectives.

Survey Methodology
The
survey asked for the opinions of IT professionals within organizations
conducting business in the U.S. Respondents represent a variety of
demographics; 63% were employed by companies with less than 1,000
employees, 21% by companies with 1,000 – 5,000 employees and 16% by
companies with over 5,000 employees. Titles ranged from IT
administrators to IT and executive managers.

"In our
experience, storage plays an important role in any virtualized
application environment – especially in terms of flexibility, agility
and HA," said Jeff Winter, information systems director for the City of Hot Springs and Garland County, Ark. "By
choosing Nimble Storage as our storage platform, we were able to
leverage all the benefits of virtualization, achieve higher ROI and
create fault tolerance across our network."