Virtualization Spurred by Economy

Related Articles

• Growth of VDI Leads to New Security Challenges
• New Email Malware Spoofs YouTube, Distributes Malicious PDFs
• Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches Featuring Send Word Now and the National Institutes of Health

Subscription Options

Subscribe Magazine

Subscribe Newswire

Widgets & RSS Feeds

A recent study shows despite the grave economic downturn, three-quarters of companies will have invested in virtualization and unified communications by year’s end due to perceived cost savings and quick return on investments, this according to Network Instruments’ third annual State of the Network Global Study.

The study involved nearly 450 CIOs, network engineers, and IT managers worldwide, and explored the economy’s impact on virtualization and unified communications as well as the primary challenges in managing these technologies.

The 2009 key study findings include:

• Virtualization rollouts surging: Over half of applications will run on virtual machines by 2011
• Strong embrace of video: Companies deploying video conferencing to double by 2010
• IT largely unaffected by layoffs: 65 percent of network teams haven’t or do not expect to experience layoffs
• Virtually in the dark: More than half lacked appropriate tools or visibility into virtual environments
• Largest troubleshooting headache: 80 percent indicated their chief troubleshooting challenge as identifying the problem source
• Emerging technology challenges: 45 percent saw virtualization as the greatest emerging monitoring challenge, followed by unified communications, cloud computing, and IPv6

“While organizations have the right idea investing in technologies that reduce corporate expenses and improve productivity, they’re failing to invest in appropriate monitoring tools,” believes Charles Thompson, product manager of Network Instruments. “This will actually create larger problems that can halt business processes and cause network teams to waste countless hours troubleshooting.”

Virtualization

The study notes that three-quarters of organizations have virtual network environments. “Currently, the majority are running less than 25 percent of applications on virtual machines. This will rapidly increase over the next two years, when the majority of applications will be hosted in virtual environments. Surprisingly, in spite of the rapid deployment of virtualization, many network teams seem ill prepared to troubleshoot performance problems. Over one-quarter of respondents cited a ‘lack of appropriate tools’ as the largest troubleshooting challenge they faced in virtual environments. This was closely followed by a lack of visibility and information.”

View the study here.