The market for virtualization software is proving something
of a conundrum for utility energy efficiency program managers, leading to the
cancellation of incentive programs in California, and hesitation by utilities
in other states to debut program offerings.
What’s the problem? Utilities are bound by program
evaluation principles that prevent providing incentives for technologies that
have reached market saturation, or in other words for technologies or measures
that customers are implementing on their own without incentives.
So answering the question about market penetration becomes
crucial for utilities and program evaluators, and in the case of
virtualization, the market statistics paint a murky picture.
I’ve sourced two rather different pictures of the market.
The first is a “virtualization industry quarterly survey” prepared by
Vanson-Bourne, a market research company, and posted at V-Index.com.
Their latest data indicates that in the US in Q3 2011, over
43 percent of all servers are now virtual, and that almost ninety percent of
the companies sampled expected to increase their use of virtualization in the
future.
The 500 plus companies that Vanson-Bourne sampled are all
“large-scale enterprises”, though significant portions of that sample are
located outside of the US.
(Another interesting set of data from Vanson-Bourne
indicates that most end users expected a ten-to-one or so consolidation ratio,
but actually achieved on average more like five-to-one. A ratio that low would
certainly yield far lower energy savings per project, and the move to newer,
more efficient servers would become more of a driver of the savings.)
My second set of information comes from an informal survey
done by the Natural Resources Defense Council under the leadership of Pierre
Delforge, who is looking at the opportunity for energy efficiency gains in
server rooms and closets.
These “distributed data centers” represent that vast
majority of facilities, with an estimate of two and a half million compared to
twenty thousand or so enterprise data centers. Market research indicates that
almost sixty percent of the servers in use today are in these small facilities.
NRDC’s sample size was quite small (about ninety companies
and institutions), and they don’t hold it up as a rigorous study, but their
results are very interesting.
Of the organizations surveyed, only 37% had virtualized at
least one server, and more starkly, less than a quarter expected to pursue
additional virtualization projects.
Even combined, these two data sets paint an incomplete
picture with regards to adoption rates of virtualization. You could certainly
conclude that most big users have implemented some level of virtualization and
are rapidly moving towards saturation levels.
You could also conclude that small and medium businesses
have a much lower adoption rate, and are moving more slowly to make
virtualization a standard practice.
What you can’t truly discern is the “squishy middle”: are
large, sophisticated users adopting virtualization in their enterprise data
centers, but not in their distributed IT infrastructure (server rooms and
closets)?
So where does that leave utility programs? In the next post,
we’ll look at California, and a design proposal for a utility program to
promote virtualization in the distributed data center segment.
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