Venyu Blog

A recent Boston Globe article reported that, according to a new forecast from IDC Corp., nearly a quarter of all servers shipped in 2014 will be actively supporting virtual machine technology. In addition, according to the press release more than 70% of all server workloads installed on new shipments in 2014 will reside in a virtual machine. IDC based its forecast on its survey of more than 400 information-technology organizations currently deploying server virtualization.

IDC found that customers are looking to not only increase the penetration of virtual servers within their environment, but also to increase the number of virtual machines per physical server. The forecasted $19 billion to be spent on server hardware in support of enterprise applications translates into 36% of all spending for server hardware in 2014 and the 23% of all server shipments will represent 2.2 million physical server hosts. IDC estimates that these 2.2 million physical servers will in reality become as many as 18.4 million logical servers with customers deploying an average of 8.5 virtual machines per physical host by 2014.

“Server virtualization is the ‘killer app’ for the datacenter and has forever changed IT operations. Most datacenters have had a ‘virtual first’ approach to server deployment for the last three years and this has meant that the majority of application instances now reside inside a virtual machine. IDC expects that 2010 will be the first year when more than half of all installed application instances will run inside a virtual machine. This has profound implications for not just maintenance and management of the datacenter but also adjacent infrastructure such as storage and networking.” said Michelle Bailey, research vice president, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends. “As the needs of the enterprise begin to turn to management constraints, large virtualization customers will have to begin to more seriously consider investments in automation tools and converged hardware as a means to lower time to deployment and simplify an increasingly complex datacenter infrastructure.”

As Venyu has maintained since its founding, transparent backup and dependable recovery mirrored in virtual servers not only informs RTO, but is also vital in supporting remote offices and putting a stake in the ground in disparate but growing geographies, an observation credibly supported by this research.

“IDC believes that as virtualization evolves, it will grow beyond the datacenter and mature markets to penetrate into branch offices and emerging regions. This process has already begun as the survey results already show increasing adoption in environments beyond the datacenter,” added Katherine Broderick, senior research analyst, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends.

So, to paraphrase a well-known secured credit card company’s tag-line, “What’s in your datacenter?”