Survey: Virtualization and cloud need management
A new survey shows virtualization and the cloud are growing, but that enterprises haven't yet chosen how to best manage their virtualized infrastructure.
A new report set to be released this week from open-source systems management provider Zenoss shows that virtualization and cloud computing technologies are set to remain important growth areas in enterprise IT environments.
The overall results of the survey of 204 IT professionals weren't terribly surprising. For example, the report shows that VMware leads the pack with nearly 80 percent of respondents using the VMware hypervisor and that more than 40 percent of the users cite flexibility as the reason for using virtualization.
However, some of the more interesting results include the fact that more than 30 percent of the respondents are using the Xen hypervisor in addition to VMware and more than 70 percent prefer tools that manage their entire infrastructure as opposed to a virtualization-specific solution.
Additionally, Linux deployments outweighed Windows deployments by about one-third, but that may be an anomaly related to the fact that the survey respondents are already using open-source software.
The fact that respondents are using more than one virtualization technology (VMware, Xen, and ostensibly KVM) shows how nascent this market really is--and that the opportunity for growth in both Linux and Windows environment remains very large.)
In the cloud, Amazon Web Services remains on the top of usage patterns and is likely to stay that way as even former cloud naysayers such as Oracle have taken the plunge to make their software applications available on EC2. Security remains an area of confusion with 40 percent of respondents citing it as their top concern.
I've suggested a number of times that tooling is likely the killer app for the cloud and this report further substantiates the fact that most enterprises are adopting virtualization and cloud technologies without paying enough attention to how it effects their overall infrastructure. There is a great deal of opportunity out there for the companies that figure out how to manage new-school IT in a holistic manner.