Despite a 21 percent decrease in the number of virtualized servers shipped this year and a virtualization software revenue decline of almost 19 percent compared to 2008,
IDC reported that licenses grew quarter over quarter.
An increase in paid virtualization platforms accounts for more than 60 percent of virtualization license shipments, said Brett Waldman, research analyst for System Software at IDC. “Virtualization is not recession proof, but it’s shown itself to be recession resilient,” he said.
The industry is showing signs of recovery from the recession as customers are moving from non-paid virtualization platforms to paid, said Waldman. “Basic capability will only take you so far, and companies are finding that they need to be able to do live migration and have greater control over their virtual machines.”
Sever virtualization has altered the way people manage their data centers, according to the IDC release, becoming the default approach for new server deployments at most enterprise IT organizations and the foundational platform for cloud computing.
IDC research found that 16.5 percent of all new servers shipped in the second quarter of 2009 were virtualized, an increase of 14.5 compared to 2008.
The market is at the beginning of a substantial infrastructure refresh cycle, according to Matt Eastwood, group vice president of enterprise platforms at IDC. He was quoted in the release to say that the worldwide server installed base has aged significantly and virtual machine densities have increased sharply over the past year.
“IDC believes that virtualization will be a cornerstone technology as medium and large enterprise organizations around the globe accelerate the need for more dynamic and converged infrastructure designed to support the business needs of the next economic cycle,” Eastwood said.
Listen to this episode of DM Radio to learn more about virtualization and why analysts estimate widespread server virtualization this year.
Adrienne Baker is associate editor at Information Management. She can be reached at adrienne.baker@sourcemedia.com.
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