Despite 54% of large enterprises worldwide rating the management of their virtual server environment as a critical or high IT priority, only 45 % think their companies are doing an effective job in this important area. That is one of the conclusions of a global virtualisation survey from CA.
The study, which surveyed 300 CIOs and other top IT executives at companies in the U.S., EMEA and APAC with more than $250 million (EUR*163) in annual revenue, revealed that servers, storage and applications are the most important areas to virtualise. However, respondents reported that the most success in virtualising servers.
Multiple platforms/vendors for server virtualisation management were used by 56% of respondents, while 35% have standardised on one platform. Some 68% of the respondents rate the importance of centralising the management of multi-platform virtualised or physical environments as critical or very important.
“Successful management of the virtualisation infrastructure is essential in order to optimise technology initiatives, enable documented returns on investments and enhance productivity across the enterprise,” said Paula Daley, vice president of product marketing at CA. “IT executives must go beyond relying on an assortment of point platform-based management tools to one that centralises virtual, physical and clustered environments. Doing so will increase their confidence in managing virtual server environments, reduce complexity, improve operational efficiency, and ensure that IT investments are optimised and generating competitive advantages for the business.”
The study found that the most important capabilities when managing a server virtualisation environment are performance/utilisation, security and automation. It also revealed the top benefits experienced as a result of server virtualisation initiatives are easier hardware provisioning and software deployment, more flexible development and testing environments, and optimising system performance.
Respondents rated security as the most significant challenge when managing server virtualisation initiatives. Measuring return on investment is also a critical management challenge. Just 28% of respondents worldwide have a method in place to measure the return on investment for virtualisation solutions, yet 51% indicate they are extremely confident or confident that their companies are maximising the return on virtualisation investments.
Over the next 18 months, the percentage of respondents in each region using virtualisation in production to support non-mission critical and mission-critical applications, as well as the percentage using virtualisation to support business continuity/disaster recovery is expected to increase, says the report. The top five mission-critical business services to be used in virtual environments are IT infrastructure, customer service, accounting/finance, data analytics, and application development.
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