Survey Says…

Even though “cloud computing” is all the rage right now, there’s a common misperception within the industry that “cloud computing equals virtualization.” Although virtualization is indeed one of the components that can make-up a private cloud infrastructure, as many IT departments are learning, virtualization alone does not a cloud build.

Earlier this week, Platform and independent analyst consulting firm Taneja Group, released the results of a survey we conducted over the summer examining how senior IT managers across a variety of industries are managing the challenges within their Test/Dev environments, as well as the opportunities for server virtualization and cloud computing solutions to address those problems.

Guess what the survey found…

The top challenge facing Test/Dev managers today? Having to manage their virtual and physical resources separately. They also said that virtualization on its own is not addressing their most important infrastructure challenges. Even Gartner reiterated this last week, as my colleague Nick Werstiuk pointed out in his blog http://platformcomputing.blogspot.com/2009/10/clouds-are-everywherebut-where-do-i.html reporting from Gartner’s ITxpo and Symposium.

Enterprises are increasingly relying on shared infrastructures—in our survey, 92 percent of Test/Dev operations are already using shared infrastructures to address operational or budgetary challenges within their departments. But many Test/Dev apps are housed both on physical and virtual machines, so not only does IT have to allocate the workload sharing among the departments, but also among different types of machines. Herein lies the problem!

Although virtualization is helping them to better enable their environments, it often adds several layers of control and cost issues that also must be addressed in order to fully integrate the capabilities of all the machines—physical or virtual. The virtual layer doesn’t include sharing, process, workflow or other management capabilities the departments need.

All of this is important because many companies are using Test/Dev departments as their first forays into private cloud computing. And all of these elements—sharing, process, workflow, management and, yes, virtualization—are crucial to building private clouds.

I’ll leave you with two other proof points from the survey. The use of private clouds is indeed underway in many Test/Dev environments. Despite all the industry hoopla and denials, companies are actually already using this stuff—and they’re not only using it for Test/Dev, but also for their production environments. Seventy-six percent of our survey respondents are already using shared infrastructures or private clouds for both Test/Dev and production applications, such as CRM, Finance and Web applications. They’re also doing this primarily within their own firewalls because they don’t trust the lack of control and immature technology that public clouds currently offer. As a result, 82 percent of respondents said they don’t use hosted solutions, only private ones.

The clouds are coming, and they’re coming fast—is your enterprise ready?

For more information on the press release and the survey, please visit:
http://searchcloudcomputing.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1256567423_786.html
www.platform.com/eforums/eforum.asp?1-1K3AU7