August 14, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Virtualization is ready for mission-critical applications, says a survey conducted by Rackspace Managed Hosting (http://www.rackspace.com/). The same survey, however, suggests the majority of people are “not comfortable utilizing a shared, virtual environment”.
Rackspace’s survey took in approximately 3,000 Rackspace customers and found 57% of survey respondents were already using virtualization for Internal applications. The survey also found that 72% of respondents are “comfortable hosting mission-critical applications in a production environment on a virtualized platform” and that 71% host applications on a virtualized infrastructure provided by a hosting provider. 42% of respondents felt virtualization would have a fundamental impact on information technology. Despite these positive figures, 87% of respondents were not comfortable with the idea of a shared environment due to performance and security vulnerabilities concerns.
"Virtualization is making significant traction in the market; however, it is still a maturing technology,” explained Nicolas Keller, Director of Platform Products at Rackspace Managed Hosting. “This is where Rackspace can fill in the gap by applying Fanatical Support to a solution that people are comfortable with and that will provide peace of mind in areas like performance and security. The first phase of virtualization has focused on cost savings from server consolidation, but the next phase will be about infrastructure management to improve flexibility and scalability. Hosting providers and utility players, like Rackspace, that manage tens-of-thousands of customer servers, need to deliver a virtualization platform that provides fast provisioning and infrastructure agility for our customers."
Rackspace plans to launch a virtualization solution it believes will “address the management of large-scale implementations” and the issues brought up by the survey. "We've been researching virtualization for a while now and wanted to make sure that our customers are ready, that the market is ready and most importantly that our offering is Fanatical Support-ready,” added Mr. Keller. "We are working thoroughly to ensure the management, high availability, performance and security pieces of our virtualization offerings are in line for a successful launch by the end of this year."
