20
Businesses Maintaining Focus on IT
Migrations
According to an independent survey undertaken in the UK by Double-Take Software,
organisations are continuing with their IT migration projects despite the current economic
climate. With server, storage and virtualisation migrations representing an already
significant investment, companies are looking for ways to reduce the overall amount of
time that they spend on migrating systems, as well as preventing downtime during moves.
Of the survey’s 158 respondents, 46 percent have at least one migration project to be
completed during 2009. Migrations are classed as including physical server refreshes,
storage migrations or implementations of virtualisation. Of those that are migrating their
systems, physical server replacements were the most common projects to be undertaken,
VIN STRANGE 1-2-1
with 37 percent of companies carrying them out. Virtualisation projects were the next most
KE
common (26 percent of migrations), followed by virtual and physical server migrations
together (11 percent) and storage migrations (10 percent). Only eight percent of
respondents were carrying out a full data centre migration including physical server,
storage and virtualisation roll-outs.
iSCSI storage is also proving to be of interest to organisations that are looking to reduce
their spending on IT: more than half of respondents (51 percent) were either evaluating
the technology or planning to implement iSCSI storage this year, while 19 percent had
already implemented. The remaining 30 percent stated that they would not be considering
iSCSI. However, most respondents were not aware of how iSCSI and booting from SAN
could potentially reduce their IT costs, particularly around desktop support – only 21
percent of respondents had considered the technology.
“The problems that organisations are facing around IT migrations are due to cost and
downtime, even though new technologies such as virtualisation can provide substantial
efficiencies and savings. These moves have to be essential to the success of the business
in order to be carried out, but the impact on end-user productivity can be considerable
without the right planning and support in place,” said Ian Masters, sales and marketing
director UK and Ireland, Double-Take Software. “There is also a significant cost when
moves have to be performed outside work hours through paid overtime or employees
giving up their free time. Organisations are looking for more effective tools to support their
migration projects, as well as providing better value back to the business when it comes
to protecting assets.”
Double-Take Software provides workload optimisation solutions that make it easier for
businesses to move, protect and recover their IT workloads. With Double-Take Move,
organisations can both shrink the potential window of downtime, as well as moving
workloads across any server, storage or virtualisation platform. “We are looking to help
organisations make their migrations easier, as well as protecting workloads as they are
migrated. Secondly, our technology approach means that applications and services don’t
have to be taken down while a migration is in progress – this avoids a significant amount
of planned downtime that would otherwise affect business productivity,” said Masters.
“Overall, we want to help businesses get to the benefits of their new technology
investments faster and speed up return on investment.”
OCT 09 WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK
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