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Budget, Inadequate IT Infrastructure, and Skill Set Cited as Main Inhibitors to Adoption.

San Jose, Calif. - Nov 15, 2012 – Nimble Storage, the leading provider of flash-optimized hybrid storage solutions, today announced the results of a survey of 476 enterprise IT professionals regarding their current experiences with and future expectations for virtualizing business-critical applications. Fifty-five percent of respondents have virtualized half or more of their business-critical applications, and the survey results indicate that number will increase to 66 percent in the next 12 months. While these results validate the future adoption of virtualization, respondents cited budget (54 percent), inadequate IT infrastructure (49 percent), and insufficient virtualization skill set and application knowledge (46 percent) as barriers to their plans for virtualization.

Key Challenges

Budget remains the largest challenge to adopting virtualization and has a compounding effect on other challenges. Insufficient infrastructure and inadequate skill set were the next top challenges reported by respondents. When asked about specific infrastructure issues experienced when virtualizing critical business applications the respondents were divided. Fifty-four percent cited either, storage performance and scalability or network infrastructure issues as the leading IT infrastructure challenges.

Key Motivators

The survey revealed an unwavering motivation to adopt and deploy virtualization despite the challenges faced. Respondents indicated the top benefits behind this trend:

• 61 percent indicated cost savings
• 60 percent indicated greater flexibility
• 45 percent indicated agility or time to deploy
• 48 percent indicated higher availability

In addition to these drivers, better scalability was listed as a key benefit of virtualizing business-critical applications by 33 percent of respondents.

Additional Key Survey Findings

Databases such as SQL Server proved to be the top virtualized workload today, with 72 percent of respondents virtualizing some or all of their databases. Messaging applications such as Microsoft Exchange are the second most-virtualized applications, according to 51 percent of respondents. Collaboration and application servers followed closely behind, with half the respondents virtualizing some or all of these workloads.

The survey also shows a growing trust in the performance and maturity of virtualization technologies for critical data. When asked how they store and serve application data storage, 60 percent of respondents indicated they did it through the hypervisor (e.g., VMDK/VHD, RDM), relying on the virtualization layer to handle data storage.

Additionally, the survey revealed a reliance on host-based backup processes for protecting critical application data. Seventy percent of respondents reported that they still rely on host-based backup processes in some form. The good news for virtualization adoption is that almost half of respondents are also using VM-consistent snapshots, which improves recovery time and recovery point objectives.

Survey Methodology

The survey asked for the opinions of IT professionals within organizations conducting business in the U.S. Respondents represent a variety of demographics; 63 percent were employed by companies with less than 1,000 employees, 21 percent by companies with 1,000 – 5,000 employees and 16 percent by companies with over 5,000 employees. Titles ranged from IT administrators to IT and executive managers.

Customer Quote

“In our experience, storage plays an important role in any virtualized application environment – especially in terms of flexibility, agility and high availability,” said Jeff Winter, information systems director for the City of Hot Springs and Garland County, Ark. “By choosing Nimble Storage as our storage platform, we were able to leverage all the benefits of virtualization, achieve higher ROI and create fault tolerance across our network.”