Survey finds usage trends of cloud, virtualization

AUSTIN, TX: Security still is the largest concern, while flexibility is the leading driver for the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing technologies, said a new survey report by Zenoss Inc., a provider of dynamic service assurance products for public, private and hybrid clouds.

The 2010 virtualization and cloud computing survey was conducted to help identify current trends in virtualization and cloud computing utilization and to collect input for addressing the IT management demands of those users.

“ Cloud and virtualization technologies are impacting IT architecture in an unprecedented way, and while the technologies develop it's equally important to provide complementary tools that provide visibility and management capabilities for the modern datacenter," said Mark Hinkle, VP of Community at Zenoss.

He added, "This survey provides data on real enterprise usage trends so we can develop software that helps users fully understand and manage their virtual infrastructure."

According to the survey data, VMware and Amazon EC2 have the largest market penetration in virtualization and cloud computing, respectively, while there are still a large number of organizations that are deploying applications on Xen, KVM, Rackspace Cloud and Google App Engine.

40.7 per cent of the respondents indicated that they preferred to deploy servers virtually, 29.3 per cent  indicated they used virtualization whenever possible. 

Flexibility and hardware savings were amongst the main reason for using these technologies.

The number one stated goal with regards to virtual infrastructure was cost savings (64.7 per cent) followed by deployment control specifically controlling virtual sprawl.

The survey also found out that vast number of virtualization users don't utilize automation. In managing virtual environments only 39.3 per cent of virtualization automate the starting and stopping of virtual machines based on operational conditions.

More than half of the respondents (73.3 per cent) have not made a decision on their virtualization management solution.  25.8 per cent  indicated they would be deploying hosted data services, while 50.8 per cent indicated they used no specific management tools for cloud computing and 33.3 per cent indicated using tools provided by their hosting provider.

Security was the number one concern for cloud computing followed by management and monitoring.