Virtualisation market faces shake-up

DatacentreDynamics reports.

The quarterly index measures the penetration rate of virtualisation across server estates, and in the last quarter out of those who used the index, it was found that 38.9% of all their servers were virtual and 86.5% were using virtualisation to some degree.

Wired says VMware has dominated the virtualisation market for so many years that the massive shift found in the survey may take longer than expected, if it happens at all.

The virtualisation layer, primarily composed of VMware software, has so many hooks into security, backup, automation, disaster recovery and various management tools that swapping hypervisors is no simple matter.

Doug Hazelman, Veeam's VP of product strategy, said in an interview that the survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, a UK market research firm, on behalf of Veeam, a third-party supplier of backup and other products to the virtualisation market, InformationWeek notes.

The survey, for the July to September quarter of companies in the US, France, Germany and the UK with over 1 000 employees, is the second one commissioned by Veeam.