Virtualization is being embraced to consolidate enterprise IT data center footprints around the world. Now, smart IT managers are also looking at virtualization as a tool for addressing Business Continuity (BC), High Availability (HA), and Disaster Recovery (DR), according to a recent study by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks company. Free benchmark study, courtesy of study co-sponsors Sun Microsystems, Pillar Data Systems, SWsoft, Xiotech Corp, and The NeverFail Group.

The report, entitled “Are You Protected? Virtualization and Business Continuity”, shows that about 50% of the surveyed organizations have virtualization deployments supporting business continuity strategies.

The report shows that virtualization has a strong ongoing adoption rate, largely due to companies’ need to cut costs through server consolidation and establish more flexible resources. About 77% of the 320 companies surveyed either have deployed or plan to evaluate some virtualization within environments. Specifically, 53% have deployed server virtualization, and 24% have plans to adopt it within the 12 months.

Thirty-eight percent (38%) use storage virtualization, with another 25% planning to deploy it within 12 months.

Aberdeen Group believes it was only a matter of time before a red flag was raised about how these new logical environments are going to be secured for high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Bottom line: end users need to start thinking not only about using virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery but also, about how to protect their newly virtualized environments.

“Virtualization has been swiftly adopted by end users, particularly in the server realm and largely due to the business pressures to consolidate the number of servers occupying precious real estate space,” said Ralph Rodriguez, Senior Vice President for Aberdeen Group. “The next step for most of these virtualization adopters is to think about how to protect these newly virtualized environments with disaster recovery, high availability, and business continuity plans,” explains Rodriguez.

To alleviate the challenge of business continuity with virtualized environments, Aberdeen believes that companies should give deep consideration whether they want to adopt a targeted technology and implement a strategy that will enable them to take advantage of improving storage utilization rates, improving server utilization rates and, at the same time, minimize unplanned downtime, reduce business / financial risk of disaster, and improve the high availability of their operations.

About this study

The Aberdeen Group report, "Are You Protected? Virtualization and Business Continuity" (September 2007), is available for free download, courtesy of co-sponsors. Registration required.

» Story on Analyst Firm Website

» Comments   Digg this    del.icio.us