Scalability and backup recovery key to virtualisation

That's among key findings from a survey by Symantec among 3,700 IT managers in 35 countries, entitled 'Virtualisation and Evolution to the Cloud'. Symantec's white paper argues that, while virtualisation and cloud computing can help streamline operations and save money, sacrificing performance is clearly not an option. That said, among organisations that had implemented storage virtualisation, 84% stated that one of their goals had been to improve storage performance or speed. And the vast majority of survey respondents implementing server virtualisation (83—88%) wanted to improve the server scalability, reduce expenses, improve up-time and availability, improve recovery readiness and increase server speed. Meanwhile, a separate survey, sponsored by EMC, presents another view, suggesting that companies are only gradually going to virtual environments. It finds that only 5% of organisations have virtualised 96-100% of their IT infrastructure, while 17% have virtualised 70-95%, 16%, 50-69% of their IT, 21% 30-49% of their IT infrastructure and so on – with 15% having virtualised none of their IT. It also reveals that its sample is primarily hoping cut costs, improve scalability, improve performance and increase preparedness for disaster recovery. "From these statistics, we know virtualisation to some degree is now very much a part of many organisations," comments Diskeeper technical presales consultant Mandeep Birdi. "But while implementing server virtualisation, IT management need to also consider ways to ensure optimal performance in their virtual infrastructure," he continues. Birdi makes the point that a problem inherent in virtual infrastructures is that windows-based virtual machines can generate excess I/Os, as a result of fragmentation. This, he reminds us, results in serious performance drops on the host, which can, in turn, impact the success of migrations. "Our software solution, V-locity virtual platform disk optimiser was specifically developed to address this issue," he states.