Bye Bye Server Huggers

Virtualization is comprised of multiple technologies that span the IT infrastructure with the ultimate goal of achieving IT transparency while delivering improved service back to the business. There is no doubt that server virtualization has had the greatest success thus far, but the current state of virtualization is still in its infancy. Yes, "virtualization" has been around IT for years including mainframe computing, but it has not had the same impact as it is currently experiencing. There is an ongoing debate whether server virtualization is actually being used for production environments or if IT organizations are just dipping their toes in the water and testing server virtualization in test/ development environments. In a recent ESG Research Report,The Impact of Server Virtualization on Storage comprised of current and planned server virtualization adopters, we discovered that 81% of the current adopters were using server virtualization in production to some degree and 46% of the current users consider themselves to be running "Tier 1" applications.

Virtualization is real and it is here to stay. Physical servers will remain in a small portion of the data centers, but virtualization will prevail. Physical server huggers and application administrators will need to loosen their grip and open their arms to a new form of computing. Server virtualization is getting the most traction today, but with the recent announcements and acquisitions from Cisco, CITRIX, Microsoft and VMware we are about to begin seeing the adoption of virtualization rapidly spread across the data center and begin to make its presence known at every layer within the IT infrastructure. Desktop virtualization and application delivery are the next opportunity for the ecosystem of vendors in the space. The success of server virtualization will continue as IT is given more choice of solutions, but it is the virtualization of desktops and applications that will ultimately have the biggest impact to your business.