Large Enterprises Lead In Demand For Storage Virtualization

In the past two years, leading storage vendors have added storage virtualization to their product suites, wading in with initial offerings that are best suited for small to medium-size businesses (SMBs), but tech marketers at these firms have been frustrated by modest adoption. From Forrester's annual data center survey of more than 1,000 firms in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, we learned that about 20% of enterprises report using some form of storage virtualization already, with Global 2000 firms and companies in industries with complex data needs being much more likely to be using it already. By 2008, about half of enterprises expect to have deployed storage virtualization. Based on in-depth conversations with users and vendors, Forrester believes that these self-reported numbers are overstated and that most current users are deploying virtualization for point migrations rather than as a permanent production architecture. However, these survey results are good news for marketers of storage virtualization, because IT buyers have high interest in storage virtualization, especially in the largest, most sophisticated IT shops.