Appliance Deployment Featured Article

To understand the business and financial impact of virtualization on an IT environment, VMware commissioned independent primary research firm Management Insight Technology to conduct a study that sheds light on key performance parameters driving the deployment of virtualized appliances. The results of this study are presented in a white paper entitled, “Business and Financial Benefits of Virtualization.”  

Some of the key findings of this study show that, on average, 36 percent of VMware customers, ranging from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to commercial organization and enterprises, have x86 servers that have been virtualized and that number is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24 percent. Likewise, going forward, return on investment (ROI) will come from operational benefits that result in improved operational and business agility. As a result, business continuity and business agility are becoming major factors in implementing a virtualized environment. However, though virtualization deployment is sponsored at increasingly higher levels, doubts still exist among some business application owners.

While 36 percent of the respondents have virtualized their x86 workloads, some 76 percent of respondents anticipated deploying virtualized appliances with next year’s newly installed x86 server workloads. Also, approximately 60 percent of respondents have virtualized one or more Tier-1 production applications. In short, from education and financial sectors to manufacturing and government, adoption of virtualization is steadily increasing across all industries.

The research indicates that ROI is also improving as organizations move forward on their virtualization journey. According to the paper, organizations using virtualization only for IT production reported an ROI of 214 percent, while organizations in the IT-as-a-Service stage see an ROI of 249 percent. Significant operational efficiencies are gained by adopting virtualization, due to platform capabilities such as fewer incidents, less downtime, higher utilization, consolidation and green saves, as well as greater efficiency of IT staff (appreciably less rework, testing, and maintenance).

Today, the primary sources of ROI are hardware savings, reductions in server provisioning time, and disaster recovery costs. However, research shows that in the future, primary sources of ROI will change to disaster recovery costs, reduced maintenance costs, and faster application release time.

The top benefits for the participants in the VMware’s virtualization study are:

• Reduction in operating expenses
• Improved business continuity
• Better response by IT to requests for new services
• Improved SLAs on IT services
• Improved customer service

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.