The largest data center owners and Internet content providers like Google are exploiting virtual machines as part of their expansion plans, a new study said.
The study from market research firm Infonetics Research, delved into operator plans for data center expansion, interconnection, capacity, physical servers, virtualization, and SAN and storage technologies.
“Server virtualization has been the focus of the data center industry for several years now, and the largest data center owners and internet content providers like Google are ubiquitously exploiting virtual machines,” Michael Howard, principal analyst for carrier networks and co-founder of Infonetics Research, said. “Yet the reality is the bulk of data center owners are more pedestrian in their deployments, finding it more operationally convenient to leave many areas of their data centers alone, using server virtualization for only select applications.”
The analyst added that “But to be sure, data center owners want to increase the value of their existing data center assets—no matter the extent of server virtualization—as a means to increase revenue via cloud services, both to keep their current customers satisfied and to attract new customers.”
More operators plan to continue investing in fiber channel for their data centers, even in the face of growing usage of the newer Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology.
The number of data center server LAN connections is growing quickly, with 10G Ethernet connections growing the most.
The average capacity of a data center WAN connection is expected to increase more than twofold between 2012 and 2014.
While the use of virtual machines in data centers continues to grow, many servers are not yet virtualized