It looks like blade servers and server virtualization not only are a perfect fit from a technology point of view but are also becoming the infrastructure of choice when consolidating.
When commercial blade servers were launched the sales pitch was all about less cabling, more density, and ease of management. But virtualising servers is allowing organisations to push the efficiencies and densities of blades even further as well as giving them more flexible deployment and recovery options for their applications and business systems.
The Blade.org industry consortium created by IBM and Intel to promote the use of the BladeCenter design has surveyed a number of organisations which have already adopted blades, hoping to get a feel for their plans for adopting virtualisation. The results show that blade users are rapidly moving towards universal use of virtualisation in addition to blades. The survey broke down the data into large enterprises (those with more than £700k in total IT budget) and SMB organisations (those with less than £700k). Here’s what the virtualisation adoption looked like in the two groups:
The survey also looked at the market share of various virtulisation vendors. In large companies VMware’s server virtualisation tools are in use at 82% of those polled, while Xen is used in 44% whilst Microsoft’s VirtualServer and Hyper-V are gaining in acceptance. However companies do not appear to be standardising. Among the SMB companies, who made up 77% of the respondents in the survey, VMware’s ESX Server is used in 65% of the SMB organisations polled, while Xen is deployed at 27% and Microsoft at 21%. Both large enterprises and SMBs cited ease of management, disaster recovery, high availability, as well as energy efficiency as the reasons they wanted to virtualise.
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