Australia biggest on server virtualisation

According to IDC, Australia has the fastest uptake and penetration of server virtualisation in the Asia Pacific region, but IDC has concerns for the stability of some virtualised environments.

In addition to server virtualisation, businesses are increasingly using virtualisation for desktops, business continuity, disaster recovery, and most recently it has expanded to include dynamic IT and internal cloud computing.

But the IDC said that as the complexity of infrastructure increases, countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where the economy is made up of small and medium businesses, are often disrupted as those businesses are less able to keep up with the rapid increase in technical intricacy.

This impact has generated the need for many businesses to externally source skills to maintain their business systems, which increases the reliance on dependable service arrangements with increasing levels of coverage.

“While virtualisation is the darling of the infrastructure market, questions are being raised about its suitability for mission critical computing,” said Matthew Oostveen, Services Research Manager at IDC.

He added: “The fundamental driver behind virtualisation has been to increase server utilisation, however, research shows that in virtualised environments, as utilisation increases, stability decreases.”

Oostveen said that while CIOs can’t fall back into old habits which will cause the oversupply of underutilised servers, stability is an issue that should be addressed and hardware should meet proper virtualisation requirements.