US-based Veeam Software, a disaster recovery and VMware management offerings provider, has launched the V-index a free resource which tracks the penetration rate of virtualisation across the server estates of large-scale enterprises.
Hosted on www.V-index.com, a site which Veeam plans to develop into a community portal, the V-index aims to take an ongoing snapshot of virtualisation’s penetration within the enterprise, consolidation ratios, and use of different hypervisors and possible barriers to further adoption.
Veeam president and CEO Ratmir Timashev said as the significant cost, power and efficiency benefits of virtualisation accelerate its position within the enterprise, so the potential of all IT infrastructures to be based on virtual estates increases.
Timashev added, "The V-index is intended to provide a simple, measurable, consistent view of the impact of the technology and grant an understanding both of virtualisation’s progress towards becoming the de facto IT platform and the obstacles in its way."
For its initial, Q2 2011 findings the V-index reported that: the current V-index Penetration Rate is 39.4%; the average number of physical servers in an enterprise is 664; and 91.9% of all enterprises are using virtualisation to some degree.
Among the indexed enterprises, each has on average 470 virtual machines, while the average number of physical hosts is 113 per enterprise.
V-index found that of the enterprises using virtualisation, 84% use VMware, 61% use Microsoft Hyper-V, 55.4% use Citrix Xen and 12% use other hypervisors.
It also found that enterprises have identified a number of barriers to increased virtualisation penetration, with 38.8% worried about reliability; 32.4% cited concerns around backup and restoration; and that 81.4% of enterprises using virtualisation are planning to increase their level of server virtualisation in the next 12 months.
"While the results show that virtualisation has become a standard technology in most enterprises, it is clear that there is still room for increased penetration. We would expect to see consolidation ratios increase over time as organisations look to magnify the ROI they get from virtualisation," Timashev said.
"We’ll be publishing the V-index results each quarter and, over time, will develop V-index.com into a community portal with real-time polls and community-driven content."
