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Storage: Virtualized Environments are Huge Consumers of Storage
IT infrastructure is experiencing a steady migration of applications from dedicated servers to virtualized machines. Roughly half (48 percent) of organizations have begun using virtual machines in their environments. 95 percent of organizations say that they plan to deploy virtualized servers over the next 12 months.
The benefits of using virtualization include:
- Reduction in hardware maintenance costs because there are fewer physical servers
- Fewer physical servers means better space utilization in data centers
- Applications can easily be separated onto their own virtual machines, avoiding possible conflict and interference between applications
- Easy to create standard server environments that can be quickly replicated and deployed
- Multiple operating systems can run side-by-side in separate VMs on the same physical machine
But what are the disadvantages of virtualization? A report by DataCore tries to investigate the issues that IT is running into when they begin using virtualization. The report finds that many think that virtualization can help their organization more efficiently utilize storage. About 70 percent of organizations have not yet tried to use cloud-based storage.
For more than two-thirds of IT groups using virtualization, storage costs have risen dramatically with the introduction of virtualization. The practice of building and backing up entire server images has become easy, but it requires huge amounts of storage.
Storage costs aren’t the only downside for virtualization related to storage. Typically when virtual and dedicated servers are compared based on the same physical hardware, there isn’t that much of a hit in CPU degradation for running a virtual machine. Where the problem comes though is with I/O degradation. Virtualized machines are often much less efficient in reading and writing to disk. The DataCore report finds that 56 percent of organizations are seeing I/O bottlenecks with virtualization, and as many as 40 percent report seeing either slower performance of the application or more limited availability of the application.
