TheInfoPro

Written by Peter ffoulkes, Research Director for Servers

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Despite the buzz around desktop virtualization, its demand and usage are still incidental – the technology is on an evolutionary path. While 25.7% of large enterprises and 19.6% of midsize enterprises are considering desktop virtualization, deployment growth is modest, and the footprint within organizations is expected to remain small for the vast majority. Usage tends to be concentrated toward offshore developers and contact centers.

TheInfoPro’s research specific to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) shows blended approaches to the desktop evolving over time, which includes desktop virtualization, application virtualization and web services. From an adoption perspective, desktop virtualization is not yet mainstream, with 47% in use. The vendor landscape is interesting, with Citrix and VMware in a near tie for in use; however, VMware is the leading vendor in pilot or in plan. Interest in Microsoft VDI solutions decreased substantially in the second half of 2010.

The number of desktops being supported by desktop virtualization tends toward the extremes, either less than 200 or more than 900, which indicates that VDI has yet to gain significant traction as a mainstream IT initiative. That much said, there is a definite trend toward increasing the number of servers and virtual desktops supported in 2011, implying a transition from pilot projects to production deployments.

As a server pro, you may be interested in which IT trends your peers are adopting. At the end of 2010, VDI had attention but little commitment.

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By: Sandra Gittlen
08 February 2010 | ComputerWorld | Original Article

Vendors claim you can pack dozens of virtual machines inside one physical server. But that’s a bad idea for heavy-duty applications. …

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07 January 2010 - While server virtualization’s benefits of consolidation and cost cutting are obvious, many enterprises have moved cautiously in deploying production applications on a virtual host. Concerns over reliability, maturity of the technology and performance have all conspired to limit what types of applications people are comfortable virtualizing. Development and test environments were natural first choices and comprised the majority of virtualized servers in 2007 and 2008, but packaged applications, such as business applications written for Windows Server, are the fastest-growing category to be virtualized. Many such applications were deployed on their own physical server in the past, even though many might have only required 5% to 10% of the system’s capacity. With the huge number of packaged applications in large enterprises, this is very fertile space for virtualization deployments to grow. 

• The top concern regarding server virtualization continues to be performance under load, or the question of just what can be colocated with what on a single physical system. Applications that use little of a given system’s resources, such as general-purpose packaged applications, are a natural safe bet to virtualize.
• Users reported that 23% of their virtualized servers are currently allocated to packaged applications, increasing to 25% by year-end 2010. This percentage has been rising steadily in each wave in which we’ve asked users this question.

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05 January 2010 – Ken Male, Founder of TheInfoPro – Every quarter we hold a roundtable for our investor clients with an executive that is part of TheInfoPro’s  (TIP) peer network of IT decision-makers. At our most recent session, our guest, the CIO of a Fortune 1000 consumer goods company, discussed in great detail how he has rolled out a sophisticated “internal cloud” platform that has drastically reduced his spending on IT Infrastructure while providing a “foundation for unified global service and application delivery.” An overarching goal when he got buy-in from his management to embark on this was to “get the IT infrastructure out of the way of the apps and user community.” Before the move to internal cloud, the company’s annual IT spending was a 1:1 ratio of application to infrastructure to support it. Those days are over – the goal of the CIO at our roundtable is to make it 80% application and 20% infrastructure by 2011 – they are at about 65%/35% today.

For several years TheInfoPro has tracked a move to the commoditization of certain infrastructure elements (e.g., servers, low-cost storage tiers). The economic crisis has made companies work hard on “optimizing” their infrastructure, as demonstrated by technologies related to this scoring so high on the TIP Technology Heat Index®, which gauges the immediacy of user need and planned spending.

So what can we take from this event as we triangulate the CIO’s comments with our data from interviews with decision-makers who represent more than $23 billion in buying power for IT infrastructure? Several threads become apparent:

1) Spending on Optimization:  Investments in technologies that drive down the ratio of spending on IT infrastructure have dominated the top quartile of our respective Heat Indexes for the better part of the past 18 months and will continue into 2010. These include: 

• WAN Optimization – Our guest CIO cited his company’s WAN being 50Mbps, and it is optimized to 400-   600Mbps. 
• Thin Provisioning – This is enabling storage teams to increase their utilization rates dramatically, and to put off purchases. 
• Deduplication – Well-documented success for backup environments. Look for more primary storage to leverage this in 2010. 
• Server Virtualization – Nearly ubiquitous today for non-mission-critical applications, we are starting to see more discussion of production applications moving to virtual environments.
• Replication – Low-cost replication solutions are starting to minimize the use of expensive backup solutions.
• Unified Communications – Leveraging  this (e.g., VoIP) continues to be deployed in an evolutionary fashion.

2) Cloud Computing: Internal vs. External? The discussion of external cloud usage has been a catalyst for the move to drop the ratio of infrastructure spending. Many organizations are able to show that the cost differential to move external is minimal. In addition, the ability to allocate more spending to the applications allows IT to be a better business partner and to help drive revenue-generating activities.

Caveat emptor – the shift to internal cloud computing architectures does not come without some pain, specifically around licensing costs. As software companies try to use the move to more processing power via internal cloud in a virtualized environment to mean more money for them,  this is becoming a contentious point. This is one of the primary drivers for more things being considered to run on open source. Stay tuned for more work on this issue.

3) Open Source: Linux continues to grow in the enterprises mostly at the expense of Unix. One key reason is the software licensing issue mentioned previously; companies are trying to avoid additional licensing costs as more processing power gets shared by an application in a virtualized/cloud environment.

4) Standardization:  From 2002 to 2008 we saw a lot of  “flavor of the month”/“one of everything” mentality.  This has changed dramatically and will continue to do so. Operating expenses have been decreased dramatically since fall 2008, and standardizing is a means to lowering spending. In addition, the aforementioned move to internal cloud is also a driver to move to standard offerings.

5) Procurement Strategies: In our work with enterprises, we see firsthand the sophisticated techniques being deployed to drive down the spending with their infrastructure providers. As an example, expect reverse auctions to procure servers and storage to become common by the end of 2010.

The biggest challenge we hear in our interviews with the Global 2000 is the ability to manage this new cloud-like infrastructure – as our research has shown for the better part of the last year,  meeting SLAs, provisioning, lifecycle management – all come into play here and will be a key battleground for the vendors to provide an effective solution.

TheInfoPro has a research practice geared specifically to cloud computing and will continue the investigation of the storage, servers, networking and security markets. In 2010, we will report on the reality of the decreased spending ratio on infrastructure and how it is evolving. We suspect the trend toward changing the ratio of application to infrastructure spending will be a driver for more M&A activity by the technology providers who, not to sound cliché, are looking to become a “one-stop shop” and provide “one throat to choke.” More details on our M&A thoughts on this can be found in Barron’s October 2009 cover story: http://online.barrons.com/article/SB125633689630504703.html.

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By: Paul Lilly
30 December 2009 | MaximumPC | Original Article

It’s been a tough year for data center managers, who have battled against a global recession for the better part of 2009 …

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