The adoption of server virtualisation continues to accelerate, according to an annual survey from Commvault.
The firm, which polled 388 people, found that 34% have virtualised between 75 and 100% of their workloads.
The firm said organisations of all sizes continue to rely on virtualisation to consolidate physical servers in an effort to rein in costs, improve application management and streamline IT operations.
But the firm warned that with those benefits comes a myriad of data protection challenges as users discover that legacy platforms are incapable of keeping up with the scale, scope and performance requirements of the virtual world.
"In order to keep pace with the data management needs of the virtualised data centre, organisations are re-evaluating protection strategies in search of a better way to protect, manage and recover their environments," it claimed.
As you would expect, VMware continues to own the lion’s share of the market ahead of Microsoft and Citrix, with 85% of those polled listing VMware as their hypervisor platform of choice.
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The survey revealed the top three factors driving the adoption of server virtualisation among the respondents are: the need to improve cost savings through operational efficiency, reduction of capital expenditures related to hardware purchases or licensing acquisition costs, and improved ease of management.
Survey respondents also showed a groundswell of support for running business-critical applications on virtual machines in their production environment, including application servers (93%), Web servers (84%), databases (72%) and messaging applications (53%).
In addition, 18% plan to make use of virtual machine replication for disaster recovery and another 10% said they plan to improve overall operational processes in managing virtual environments.
In terms of data protection, 90% of respondents said they prefer a single backup application for virtual and physical environments. Commvault naturally claims its Simpana software delivers just that.
