Improving application performance and overcoming storage bottlenecks are the top business priorities for virtualized environments

Some interesting reports:

Enterprise Strategy Group recently comments on how organizations are resisting the move to virtualize their tier-1 applications due to poor performance:

"With the increasing demands on IT, users have less tolerance for poor application performance," said Mike Leone, ESG Lab engineer, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Many organizations resist moving tier-1 applications to virtual servers for fear that workload aggregation will slow performance. As a poor attempt to combat the problem, organizations add more hardware and software to the IT infrastructure, but with that comes higher costs and increased complexity. ESG research on virtualization revealed that after budget concerns and lack of legacy application support, performance issues were the key concern preventing organizations from expanding their virtualization deployments."

Storage and I/O bottlenecks appear to be the major obstacles. Gridstor recently published survey highlights the top priorities surrounding mid-market enterprises' virtual infrastructure requirements.



The industry survey revealed that improving application performance (51%) was the top business priority for virtualized environments, followed by the need to reduce I/O bottlenecks between VMs and storage (34%), the need for increased VM density (34%), the need to decrease storage costs (27%), and the need for improved manageability for virtualized systems (24%).



Respondents in the survey demonstrated agreement that storage resources have a direct correlation to the application performance and, as a result, ROI derived from virtualization projects. When asked about the top five factors they consider when choosing storage systems for virtualization projects, some of the highest priority responses included theability for storage to scale performance as needed (47%), the ability for storage to scale capacity as needed (47%), and the ability for storage to scale I/O as needed (37%).

The survey was conducted across 353 organizations representing multiple industry categories particularly in the areas of technology (14%), healthcare (13%), education (11%), government (8%), and finance (6%). The majority of responding companies had over 1,000 employees (93%) and more than 100 servers (59%).

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/marketreport/gridstore-application-performance