69% of Respondents With More Than 250TB of Virtualized Storage Employing or Planning Hybrid Storage

Imation Corp. shared research compiled from a survey of more than 1,200 IT professionals at SMEs on competitive advantages achieved from server virtualization.

Highlighting best practices for the use of storage systems to support virtualized environments, the complimentary report on the research, State of Storage in Virtual Environments: Insights from the Midmarket," can be downloaded (registration needed.)

The report shows that organizations are increasingly turning to hybrid storage solutions to meet the performance and manageability demands of virtualized environments. In addition, the study finds that organizations that make broader commitments to virtualizing their environments yield a higher return in terms of storage optimization, performance and operational capabilities.

Highlights include:

• Rise of hybrid storage systems: According to survey, 69% of respondents with greater than 250TB of virtualized storage are employing or planning to deploy a hybrid storage approach to meet storage demands of virtual servers – heavily randomized I/O operations, for instance. Given that hybrid storage systems are relatively new to market in the past four years, current and planned adoption rates are impressive.
• Dramatically improved consolidation ratios: Organizations that have virtualized at least 60% of their environment achieve a consolidation ratio – the average number of VMs residing on each physical server – of 16:1 or greater. This is double the ratio achieved by organizations with 20% or less of their operations virtualized.
• Increased adoption of virtualized applications: When asked about applications currently virtualized or that are planned to be virtualized, respondents with greater than 40% of their environments virtualized are virtualizing a far wider range of applications. This includes more specialized applications such as procurement, accounting and financial management.
• More effective use of virtualization tools needed: Use of VMware’s vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) could enable speed improvements of up to 80% in management operations, yet among respondents with less than 20% of the data center virtualized, a super-majority (80%) was unaware of the availability of VAAI. Only half of SMEs that have virtualized 80 to 100% of their environments have either activated VAAI or are actively considering it.

"The IT professionals who responded to this survey yielded insight into a simple truth: The more strategically organizations see virtualization as an enabling technology, the greater the benefits that they reap, not only in terms of storage optimization and performance but also other operational capabilities – consolidation, rapid deployment and reconfiguration of VMs to meet changing business needs," said Mike Stolz, VP marketing and technical support for Imation’s Nexsan solutions. "These benefits directly correlate to business agility, greater efficiency and competitive advantage."

"Imation brings storage technologies that were first available and affordable only to large enterprises within reach of organizations of any size that require optimized performance, reliability and manageability. This allows a wide array of organizations to benefit from storage-intensive data center efforts, such as server virtualization," Stolz said. "Imation delivers unified, hybrid storage solutions built for simultaneous support of block and file architectures as well as solid-state storage, DRAM and disk – all within a single solution to support virtual environments without sacrificing performance."