I recently spoke at a Hewlett-Packard roadshow with prospective customers in Florida. Small and midmarket enterprise decision-makers filled the audience. The questions were incredible: mobility, networking, security, remote connectivity, video communications and compliance, just to name a few topics. Folks often ask me why my Ask Steve column covers so many types of technology. Doesn’t surprise me one lick: SMBs and the ecosystem serving them want to understand their options and purchase wisely. I’ll tackle one very relevant question from a technologist in the Tampa crowd.
Q: What is happening with virtualization and SMBs?
-- Joe, Tampa, Fla.
A: The power of virtualization has reached SMB markets, although not as deeply as enterprise markets. According to Yankee Group 2008 SMB survey data, 26 percent of medium businesses (100 to 499 employees) are using server virtualization in production servers. By comparison 43 percent of enterprises (500+ employees) are using server virtualization today. Within 24 months, 69 percent of medium businesses expect to use server virtualization, quite a two-year growth rate. Just for the record, 23 percent of small businesses (20 to 99 employees) and 8 percent of very small businesses (2 to 19 employees) use server virtualization in production servers.
Why do SMBs adopt server virtualization? Like their larger enterprise brethren, SMBs adopt virtualization to reduce or contain costs associated with the number of servers they own (see chart, SMB Adoption Drivers for Virtualization). However, a secondary reason is that SMBs want to provide disaster recovery and failover solutions, both of which are more easily and cheaply implemented inside virtualized server environments.
