EUROPE LAGS US IN VIRTUALISATION ADOPTION

Posted on: 04/07/2008

As the information explosion continues to drive businesses into the virtualised world, storage virtualisation continues to deliver real world business benefits to adopters. Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe by leading provider of clustered NAS solutions for enterprises and content rich organisations, ONStor, Inc., indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in both regions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years.

While it has been widely recognised that storage virtualisation is the best way to provide a flexible, scalable and highly available storage environment, only 27% of European respondents are actually implementing storage virtualisation today as compared with 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.

In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realise operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other significant results from the survey include:

* 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one to two years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%

* Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualisation solution. In Europe the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

* 45% of US respondents consider 20-40% operational cost savings to be the number one motivation to switch from their current file storage solution to virtualised storage. In Europe the figure was comparable at 48%.

Customers are often faced with insurmountable amounts of data stored on a variety of disparate storage resources which highlights the need for a centralised, virtualised storage solution which is easy to manage. These solutions allow storage administrators to identify, provision and manage disparate storage as a single aggregated resource.

In addition, storage virtualisation allows storage resources to be altered and updated on the fly without disrupting application performance, generally reducing storage downtime for repairs and maintenance.

Respondents across both continents agree that as information continues to double year on year, storage virtualisation is fast becoming a business imperative.