New Research Reveals Virtualization is Not Enough When Embracing Private Cloud

Cross-Industry Survey Uncovers New Virtualization and Cloud Trends within
Test/Dev Infrastructures

TORONTO, Oct. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Companies are using their testing and
development (Test/Dev) infrastructures more and more as a proving ground for
implementing shared infrastructure and private cloud environments, according
to a recent survey of senior IT managers for Test/Dev infrastructures at North
American firms. Conducted between June and August 2009 by analyst consulting
firm the Taneja Group, the survey revealed that the top challenge of running
Test/Dev environments is the need to manage virtual and physical resources
separately, with 72 percent of respondents indicating that virtualization on
its own does not address their most important Test/Dev infrastructure
challenges.

The Taneja Group surveyed 83 senior IT managers across the banking,
government, manufacturing, telecommunications, software, health and
pharmaceutical industries. The survey examined current challenges of managing
Test/Dev environments, as well as the opportunities for server virtualization
and cloud computing solutions to address those problems.

Although 92 percent of Test/Dev operations are already using shared
infrastructures, companies are investing significantly in
infrastructure-sharing initiatives to address the operational and budgetary
challenges currently faced by those departments. According to the survey, 50
percent of respondents will have a funded project start in 2009, while 66
percent of respondents will have a funded project started by end of 2010.

Despite the investments being made in infrastructure sharing, 82 percent of
respondents say they do not use hosted environments outside their own
firewalls, with lack of control and immature technology cited as the top
barriers to adoption, indicating that most firms are looking primarily to
private cloud infrastructures to support Test/Dev projects. Even though these
projects remain primarily within organizational confines, shared
infrastructures are beginning to bridge the divide between pre-production and
production silos. According to the survey, 76 percent of respondents use
shared infrastructures or private clouds not only for Test/Dev, but also for
production enterprise applications such as CRM, Finance and Web applications.
Of those, 30 percent are sharing resource pools between both Test/Dev and
production applications, indicating a rising comfort level with sharing
infrastructure within IT departments overall.

"Despite the confusion in the market about the economics of the various
flavors of cloud computing, it's clear that enterprises are comfortable with
and actively sharing both physical and virtual infrastructure internally,"
said Dave Bartoletti, Senior Analyst and Consultant, Taneja Group. "This
survey reaffirms that shared infrastructure is common in Test/Dev environments
and also reveals it's increasingly being deployed for production workloads.
Virtualization is seen as a key enabling technology, but on its own does not
address the most important operational and management challenges in a shared
infrastructure."

Managing both virtual and physical resources remains a challenge for most
Test/Dev environments, with 55 percent of respondents rating it as having a
high or medium impact on the environment. Although 89 percent of respondents
use virtualization for Test/Dev, a significant amount of work is still being
done on non-virtualized infrastructure. Over half of respondents stated that
they have virtualized less than 25 percent of their servers. Although users
do see virtualization as an enabler for Test/Dev environments, they
acknowledge that it often adds several layers of control and cost issues that
must be addressed by sharing, process, workflow and other management
capabilities in order to fully maximize and integrate both virtual and
physical infrastructures.

"Test/Dev environments are one of the most logical places for organizations to
begin implementing private clouds and prove the benefits of a more elastic,
self service, pay-per-use service delivery model," said Martin Harris,
Director Product Management, Platform Computing. "We've certainly seen this
trend among our own customers and have found that additional management tools
enabling private clouds are required to effectively improve business service
levels and address cost cutting initiatives."

Notes to Editors on Methodology: Survey of 83 IT architecture and operations
managers responsible for development and test infrastructure conducted
June-August 2009 at North American firms, cross-industry. The survey was
sponsored by Platform Computing. To download the report, please visit:
www.platform.com/eforums/eforum.asp?1-1K3AU7 or
http://searchcloudcomputing.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1256567423_786.html.

About Platform Computing
Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management
software - serving more than 2,000 of the world's most demanding
organizations. For 17 years, our workload and resource management solutions
have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC
applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM,
Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.

SOURCE Platform Computing

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