The adoption of server virtualization continues to accelerate as organisations of all sizes consolidate physical servers in an effort to rein in costs, improve application management and streamline IT operations, said a report.

In order to keep pace with the data management needs of the virtualized data center, organisations are re-evaluating protection strategies in search of a better way to protect, manage and recover their environments, said the annual end-user Virtualization Survey conducted by CommVault, a leading developer of data management solutions.

Server virtualization demand and deployments are strong and have continued to accelerate year on year among CommVault customers, despite the ongoing economic downturn, said the survey, which polled Simpana software customers worldwide.

Overall, the adoption of server virtualization has increased year on year with 34 per cent of the 388 survey respondents stating their server environments were 75 per cent - 100 per cent virtualized.

VMware continues to own the lion’s share of the market vis-à-vis Microsoft and Citrix with 85 per cent of those polled listing VMware as their hypervisor platform of choice.

The survey revealed the top three factors driving the adoption of server virtualization among the respondents are: the need to improve cost savings through operational efficiency, reduction of capital expenditures related to hardware purchases or licensing acquisition costs, and improved ease of management.

Survey respondents also show a groundswell of support for running business-critical applications on virtual machines in their production environment, including application servers (93 per cent), Web servers (84 per cent), databases (72 per cent) and messaging applications (53 per cent).

According to those polled, the three most cited primary concerns surrounding the deployment of data protection solutions in virtual server environments were cost, ineffective backups and lengthy and complex restore processes.

As users continue to adopt and expand server virtualization, 27 per cent of respondents said that improving the backup and recovery process is one of the top initiatives for 2012. In addition, 18 per cent plan to make use of virtual machine replication for disaster recovery and another 10 per cent said they plan to improve overall operational processes  in managing virtual environments.

As virtual environments continue to be complex and heterogeneous with products from multiple vendors, integration and interoperability is important. In terms of data protection, however, 90 per cent of respondents said they prefer a single backup application for virtual and physical environments.

Simpana software delivers just that with the unique ability to unify backup and recovery, archive, replication, storage resource management (SRM) and search capabilities under a common code base to help users scale and protect legacy physical and virtualized server and cloud-storage environments.

According to the survey results, 46 per cent of the respondents are running between 50 and 250 virtual machines, which is the same percentage reported in last year’s survey.

However, 15 per cent of respondents to this year’s survey stated they are running between 250 and 500 VMs versus just nine per cent last year indicating that the number of users with large-scale VM deployments continues to grow.

In spite of the fact that the scale and scope of VM deployments continues to explode, a protection gap in virtual server environments remains. Only 35 per cent of respondents said they are backing up all of their virtual servers.

There is also a need for improved disaster recovery. Forty-three per cent of respondents are relying only on backup copies as their disaster recovery plan while 20 per cent rely on hardware replication and 14 per cent rely on software-based replication. Sixteen per cent of respondents said they have no disaster recovery plan for their virtual environment.

Faced with these challenges, organisations are re-evaluating their data protection strategies to accommodate virtual server growth. Forty-three per cent of respondents have already re-evaluated their data protection strategies as a result of their server virtualization initiatives and another 34 per cent plan such a re-evaluation.

“There is no question that the adoption of server virtualization technology continues to accelerate as more and more enterprise organisations consolidate their business-critical applications on VMs, reinforcing the need for a modern approach to data management,” said David West, senior vice president of marketing and business development for CommVault.

“CommVault Simpana software delivers the ability to protect hundreds of VMs in minutes, scales to protect the largest virtual environments and gives customers more flexibility and control all from a single, unified platform,” West concluded. – TradeArabia News Service