Virtualisation not trusted for critical apps
Datacentre operators across Asia Pacific and Japan are resisting virtualisation for critical application environments, according to new research.
While server consolidation is a high priority for most datacentre operators, it is only occurring for non-critical application servers, according to Symantec's global state of the datacentre survey, which questioned 800 datacentre managers from 14 countries.
Just 20 percent of respondents said they would consolidate mission critical servers but 59 percent said they were happy to virtualise 'relatively unimportant' ones.
Forty-three percent said they would consolidate 'test and development' servers.
Paul Lancaster, systems engineering director at Symantec Australia, said the results show administrators do not yet trust virtualisation for critical apps.
"The survey showed there are a number of concerns around large investments into the virtualisation of physical servers. The first was around mission critical servers not being deployed onto a virtualisation platform," he told ZDNet Australia.
The survey also revealed fewer datacentre managers in Asia Pacific (29 percent) had started virtualising servers compared to the world average of 39 percent.
Analysts agree that for many larger organisations, the uptake of virtualisation has been slow for production environments while it has been rapid for lower risk environments.
"Virtualisation of test and development environments has exploded. Of course, test and development has a low impact if it goes wrong, but it also offers huge value in reducing the number of servers," Intelligent Business Research Services analyst Kevin McIsaac told ZDNet Australia.
Other major problems facing datacentre operators, according to Symantec's research, are difficulties finding and retaining staff and meeting increasingly tough service level agreements (SLAs).
However McIsaac said the issue of labour shortages is certainly not datacentre-specific and disagreed that meeting SLAs, at least for Australian datacentre operators, is a major problem.
A greater problem, according to McIsaac, is the issue of power and cooling due to ageing buildings that don't permit operators to replace datacentres with new air conditioning technology.
"Every three to four years, the power of servers has gone up significantly, yet datacentres are only refreshed every 20 to 25 years. The answer to that is that we need the physical infrastructure -- power and cooling -- to be modular, so you can rip it out every five to seven years," said McIsaac.