Cross-Industry Survey Uncovers New Virtualization and Cloud Trends
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| Courtesy of Michael Jastremski |
Companies are using their testing and development (Test/Dev) infrastructures more and more as a proving ground for implementing shared infrastructure and private cloud environments, according to a recent survey of senior IT managers for Test/Dev infrastructures at North American firms. Conducted between June and August 2009 by analyst consulting firm the Taneja Group, the survey revealed that the top challenge of running Test/Dev environments is the need to manage virtual and physical resources separately, with 72 percent of respondents indicating that virtualization on its own does not address their most important Test/Dev infrastructure challenges.
The Taneja Group surveyed 83 senior IT managers across the banking, government, manufacturing, telecommunications, software, health and pharmaceutical industries. The survey examined current challenges of managing Test/Dev environments, as well as the opportunities for server virtualization and cloud computing solutions to address those problems.
Although 92 percent of Test/Dev operations are already using shared infrastructures, companies are investing significantly in infrastructure-sharing initiatives to address the operational and budgetary challenges currently faced by those departments. According to the survey, 50 percent of respondents will have a funded project start in 2009, while 66 percent of respondents will have a funded project started by end of 2010.
Despite the investments being made in infrastructure sharing, 82 percent of respondents say they do not use hosted environments outside their own firewalls, with lack of control and immature technology cited as the top barriers to adoption, indicating that most firms are looking primarily to private cloud infrastructures to support Test/Dev projects. Even though these projects remain primarily within organizational confines, shared infrastructures are beginning to bridge the divide between pre-production and production silos. According to the survey, 76 percent of respondents use shared infrastructures or private clouds not only for Test/Dev, but also for production enterprise applications such as CRM, finance and Web applications. Of those, 30 percent are sharing resource pools between both Test/Dev and production applications, indicating a rising comfort level with sharing infrastructure within IT departments overall.
"Despite the confusion in the market about the economics of the various flavors of cloud computing, it's clear that enterprises are comfortable with and actively sharing both physical and virtual infrastructure internally," said Dave Bartoletti, Senior Analyst and Consultant, Taneja Group. "This survey reaffirms that shared infrastructure is common in Test/Dev environments and also reveals it's increasingly being deployed for production workloads. Virtualization is seen as a key enabling technology, but on its own does not address the most important operational and management challenges in a shared infrastructure."
Managing both virtual and physical resources remains a challenge for most Test/Dev environments, with 55 percent of respondents rating it as having a high or medium impact on the environment. Although 89 percent of respondents use virtualization for Test/Dev, a significant amount of work is still being done on non-virtualized infrastructure. Over half of respondents stated that they have virtualized less than 25 percent of their servers. Although users do see virtualization as an enabler for Test/Dev environments, they acknowledge that it often adds several layers of control and cost issues that must be addressed by sharing, process, workflow and other management capabilities in order to fully maximize and integrate both virtual and physical infrastructures.
"Test/Dev environments are one of the most logical places for organizations to begin implementing private clouds and prove the benefits of a more elastic, self service, pay-per-use service delivery model," said Martin Harris, Director Product Management, Platform Computing. "We've certainly seen this trend among our own customers and have found that additional management tools enabling private clouds are required to effectively improve business service levels and address cost cutting initiatives."
Methodology: Survey of 83 IT architecture and operations managers responsible for development and test infrastructure conducted June-August 2009 at North American firms, cross-industry.
The survey was sponsored by Platform Computing.
To download the report: www.platform.com/eforums/eforum.asp?1-1K3AU7 or http://searchcloudcomputing.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1256567423_786.html