90 percent of UK organisations plan to invest in virtualisation
Research has revealed that 90 percent of UK organisations have already migrated – or are planning to migrate – to a virtualised environment. The figures were revealed when researchers asked the 400 It professionals: “Are your current system management and monitoring tools able to support virtualisation?”
Twenty three percent responded: “Yes our current tools will enable us to keep access available.” While a further 67 percent responded in the affirmative to the question: “We are investing in new tools to enable us to manage virtualised infrastructure.”
“These responses mean that 90 percent of organisations polled for the survey are using or planning to use some form of virtualisation technology with their IT systems,” says Natalie Booth, event director with Storage Expo, the organisation that commissioned the research. “Our research also found that, while security is holding back 30 percent of organisations polled, the majority (60 percent) plan to invest in new technology to tackle the security problems created by the migration to a virtual environment.”
Tony Lock, programme director with Freeform Dynamics, said that virtualisation is adding new challenges all around but the biggest security challenges are matters of process rather than technology fixes. “This, of course, also makes them more difficult to address as one cannot rush out and buy a process fix in the same way one can acquire a new firewall or virus scanner,” he explained.
According to Lock, several issues must be carefully considered in any virtualisation project. In most organisations that have undertaken such projects, he says, the primary approach has centred upon consolidation, which has caused multiple virtual machines – or instances to be run on single server platforms or to create virtualised pools of storage.
“By placing multiple applications on a single server or accessing a single resource pool of storage the resiliency of the physical platforms becomes incredibly important,” he said. “In ‘pre-virtualisation’ days if a single x86 server failed only a single group of users were likely to be affected. If a virtual server dies it can potentially take with it a number of applications and a much higher number of users.”
