Early adopters of virtualisation re-embrace physical servers

There is still massive demand for tape-based storage, according to CA

Some organisations are ditching virtual servers and moving back to physical servers because of performance issues around memory and CPU capabilities.

This is according to Andy Brewerton, senior director of business development at CA Technologies, in conversation with Computing at the 360 IT Infrastructure Event at Earls Court on Wednesday.

Brewerton explained that this trend tended to apply to early adopters of virtualisation.

"[These organisations] did not scale their virtualisation requirement in the same way as later entrants," said Brewerton.

"Some organisations sized the virtual environment to cope with a specific database, which then grew beyond expectations. We're consequently seeing a lot of demand for migration back from virtual to physical," he added.

Unsurprisingly, the move back to physical was normally seen as a short-term solution. "These companies need to fix the performance problem in the short term; but the end goal is still usually to be more virtual," said Brewerton.

In addition, there are also organisations requiring virtual-to-virtual migrations. "Organisations sometimes use something such as Hyper-V for testing, but VMware for production, and they may need to change one or other of their environments to make them compatible," added Brewerton.

He also said many organisations were rediscovering the benefits of tape for their storage and backup requirements.

"Longer term it's better to use tape. Discs cost money to run and spin," he said. "Tape has never gone away, it's just changed its role."

He concluded that while his organisation is still seeing a massive demand for tape, the cloud may finally render it obsolete.