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Server virtualization success stories continue to pour in from the front lines. A Forrester survey released last year indicates that almost 60% of companies with 500 or more employees have already implemented virtual servers, doubling the adoption rate reported in a similar study in 2005. Adoption among small and medium-sized businesses is only slightly lower than that among enterprises, says Forrester. VMware asserts that up to 40% of its customer base falls into the midmarket category.
Matt Brudzynski, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, believes that midmarket companies are actually making a deeper commitment to virtualization than their enterprise counterparts, though he says server virtualization doesn't make much sense for companies with fewer than 15 servers. "The initial assumption was that small and medium companies just aren't using it," he says. "But when we delved into it, we found that, sure, larger companies have a larger adoption rate because they all dabble in it. But because of political complexity and risk aversion, on average only 10% of their infrastructure is virtualized.
"The deciding factor for ease of implementation had to do with how open the organization was to a major infrastructure change," he adds. "What we found was a direct correlation to that mind-set based on the size of the company."
Nevertheless, most CIOs tend to take a conservative approach to virtual server adoption. They often first deploy virtual servers in noncritical areas, such as test and development, file and print, and Web servers. "From the midmarket CIO standpoint, it's not a question of if but how much," says IDC's Elliot. "For file, print and basic services today, it's a no-brainer."
Many CIOs start their virtualization journey with storage before deploying virtual servers for applications. Susan Cerrone Abely, CIO and vice president of Roger Williams Medical Center, a $160-million hospital in Providence, R.I., implemented virtual storage to handle massive data spikes. "We can generate 400 gigabytes of data over four months," she says. "We needed to be much more adept at scaling up."
The 220-bed medical center consolidated and virtualized both its storage and primary server infrastructure last year by implementing an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 8000 storage area network (SAN) with 4 terabytes of initial capacity, along with 41 HP ProLiant BL20p server blades. When Cerrone Abely first researched virtualization, she discovered the hospital's application vendor, Meditech Inc., had not yet authorized its product to run on any of the major virtualization vendors, such as VMware. So she focused on virtualizing the hospital's storage instead.
"Storage virtualization, to me, means I went out and bought 400 gigabytes of storage, and I can allocate 500 gig here and 500 elsewhere -- and then say, 'I need to move that first 500 somewhere else.' It's just a large storage capacity that I allocate virtually to wherever I want it to be allocated.
"The way it's architected now, we drop in a server, it images right off the SAN, and we're ready to go," Cerrone Abely says. "It has lived up to everything that was promised in terms of scalability."
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