Have we reached peak virtualisation?

Computing Research reveals that uptake of server and storage virtualisation may have plateaued

For the past three years we have been conducting research into trends within the data centre, the results of which we present at our annual Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit.

Previous years saw survey respondents report big rises in both server and storage virtualisation, but this year the same question revealed little or no growth at all. Why should this be? Well, first we should consider that this might just be a rogue result. No single survey on any topic should be taken as Gospel and there can be any number of factors that can influence the results.

Having said that, when we shared the results with some senior practitioners in the field many were not surprised, offering a number of explanations as to why we might really be seeing "peak virtualisation" in the on-site data centre - at least in its current form.

"It's hitting critical mass. Organisations have come as far as they can. Some services and applications don't lend themselves very well to virtualisation," said the IT security manager in a legal firm.

"The things that we haven't virtualised are things that are very had to virtualise. It might be specific legacy systems. Things like OpenVMS are not candidates for virtualisation," said a head of technical architecture, in the health sector.

Many legacy applications are simply too difficult to virtualise, while for others that require extremely low latency the performance costs might be too much to bear.

Our survey found that on average 68 per cent of data centre servers are now virtualised along with 50 per cent of storage. These figures are almost unchanged from 2014. In contrast, the previous year saw a huge leap in which both of those figures jumped by about 10 per cent.

What's more, the expectations of the growth of virtualisation do not seem to be materialising. In 2013, research participants predicted they would have on average 60 per cent of their storage virtualised by 2016. If this is to occur, most of that growth will have to happen next year, which seems unlikely.

The growth curve would appear to be flattening.

There is a real divide between the first movers, who are now moving towards full capacity with virtualisation, and those who never saw much in it for them anyway. Fifty-three per cent of respondents described their data centres as "heavily virtualised". In contrast, 33 per cent of respondents still had a "traditional data centre or server room" and eight per cent were using primarily externally hosted or cloud services with a further two per cent having outsourced all services. Those who are moving significant services to the cloud or to a colocation provider (both rapidly growing trends) will have little use for large-scale in-house virtualisation beyond that required to support their cloud-based applications. Meanwhile, those running "traditional" data centres are not virtualising to full capacity because of performance, security or compliance reasons, or because they are reliant on legacy applications.

The next generation of virtualisation is coming down the line in the shape of software-defined and converged infrastructure and application containerisation software like Docker, but while our survey revealed plenty of interest in these technologies, there is a very low level of take-up just yet.

For now it would seem that those that haven't virtualised are in no big hurry to to so, and those that have are intent on adding value to their investments rather than jumping into the next phase.

"People have now virtualised as much as they can and it's stabilised. Now they are looking for ways to minimise the costs overhead-wise and infrastructure-wise," the technical solutions infrastructure architect at a museum told us. "They're trying to take what they've virtualised and get more from it."

Virtualisation really might have plateaued after all.

The full results of our Data Centre Research programme will be presented at this year's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit in London on September 23rd. Attendance is FREE for most delegates. Register today.