Is storage holding back virtualization?
According to a survey from VM-aware storage provider Tintri, storage performance is a top inhibitor of virtualization adoption.
Virtualization's benefits--server consolidation, improved resource utilization, faster application deployment, and overall flexibility--have made it one of IT's most important tools.
Earlier this year, a Gartner survey of more than 2,000 CIOs indicated that virtualization was one of their highest priorities in 2011 (eclipsed only by cloud computing).
But given the benefits and the rapid adoption of virtualized environments, can we expect virtualization will be extended to 100 percent of applications? If not, what are the barriers to increased virtualization footprints with the enterprise?
Tintri, a provider of VM-aware storage appliances, recently conducted a survey of 126 virtualization users to find out more, and the results were telling. While more than 63 percent of the respondents planned to be at least 75 percent virtualized by the end of 2012, only 36 percent indicated they were heavily virtualized today.
When polled about the barriers to expanding their virtual environments within their organization, storage performance (46 percent) and storage cost (51 percent) topped the list by a wide margin (application support came in third at 23 percent).
Digging deeper, Tintri asked participants to identify the top three capabilities they consider when selecting storage solutions for virtual machines. The top two results were performance isolation for VMs (52 percent) and VM-level performance visibility (45 percent).
One final note of interest--94 percent of survey respondents indicated the VMware was their primary hypervisor. Definitely not good news for Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Citrix (XenServer).
You can read more about the results and methodology behind the survey at the Tintri blog.