* Industry experts don’t see virtualization hurting server sales
After a recent story on server virtualization, a reader asked whether I thought users deploying technologies like VMware to consolidate applications on a single physical server would erode server sales.
I posed the question to an analyst with Illuminata, as well as storage executives from EMC and VMware (an EMC company).
Howard Elias, executive vice president of corporate marketing for EMC, says that at this time, only 2% to 3% of companies virtualize their servers. At some point in the future, Elias hopes server virtualization will have an impact on server sales.
Ask Karthik Rau, director of product management for VMware, and he will say the same thing.
“We certainly haven’t seen that being the case,” Rau says. “Generally speaking, virtualization has accelerated the server refresh cycle – a lot of new deployments of VMware are on new hardware.”
Ask Gordon Haff, senior analyst for Illuminata, the same question and he rejects it out of hand. Haff says, “No. Did faster processors erode server sales? Although faster processors sometimes do erode server sales on an individual basis, in the aggregate it would be hard to make the case.”
Even though these experts don’t think we will see a dent in server sales because of virtualization, they agree that one of virtualization’s best uses is server consolidation – the process of converging the applications that would normally run on multiple servers to one physical machine which has been parsed up into several virtual machines.
“Virtual machines also make it relatively easy to provision new services – people are able to deploy new workloads and get them out in production much faster than they would be able to in a physical server environment,” Rau says.
