According to a recent Tech Target poll, virtualization is marching forward along the fronts of desktop, disaster recovery and cloud. Two-thirds of those surveyed plan to expand virtualization efforts in 2012 with disaster recovery (DR) topping the identified use case for the technology; interest in VDI jumping 10 points; and plans for private cloud more then tripling. From these kinds of numbers its clear virtualization is the ‘go to’ tool for cost reduction, consolidation and data center modernization.

All-in-all, great news for those of us in the business of virtualizing the data center.

But is there more going on behind the scenes? Dig a little deeper on the TechTarget site and you’ll see another insight gleaned from the same survey: Physical servers live on longer than IT pros predict.

In a nutshell, Tech Target also finds that apps installed on bare metal workloads are “sticking around, even as virtualization becomes the default platform for new applications and vendors talk up the vision of private clouds running in 100% virtual data centers”

This finding is a good reminder that, when presented with something new, we always expect change to happen faster and further then it does in the real world. That’s human nature. Applied to the data center, it means we forget that IT infrastructure is sticky and the installed base has a very long tail. All one has to do is look at Mainframes to see that.

New Math: 87% + 75% = 100%?

In the theoretical example TechTarget cites, a company has 100 servers in its data center. Twenty-five of the servers in the data center are virtualized – each running 20 VM’s – for 500 total applications. The remaining 75 servers are running bare metal apps – presumably 1 app each of those systems. In the example 87% of the applications have been virtualized but 75% of the servers are “bare metal.”

The ‘new math’ implication: we should all be planning for a world of where physical and virtual servers do and will continue to co-exist.

So…how do you do unify the physical and virtual worlds through a common foundation? Dig a bit further into TT’s survey and you see customer interest in compute fabrics has increased three-fold since last year. This interest is being driven both by the need to provide agile and reliable physical infrastructure for IT modernization projects (including virtualization) and also by a need to stand up that infrastructure quickly. This interest, at least initially, is expressed through inquiries and reviews of Cisco’s UCS platform. But, if you’re a customer using another brand of blade server, does thismean you need to migrate all of your infrastructure to Cisco or you will be shut out from accessing the benefits of compute fabrics?

Don’t Lock Me In.

In some of my recent conversations, IT execs have pointed out that, from their perspectives, there are a couple of glaring flaws with UCS. First, it only works with Cisco hardware. CIOs just don’t want to be tied to proprietary hardware– both from a pricing perspective and from a risk point of view. Secondly, if you can get over the lock-in hurdle, in most cases UCS requires major data center “re-architecting” (aka rip and replace). And this flies right in the face of the CIO’s mandate to modernize quickly and with minimum disruption.

The alternative? Compute fabrics that are built from industry standard blade servers and tied together with through open software solution. In essence, enable customers to modernize their data centers without having to rip out and replace their server infrastructure. That is the path of evolution – the path that meets customers where they are.

This is the path of PAN Manager.

To date Egenera has teamed with HP, Fujitsu, Dell, and NEC partners to bring PAN Manager and converged infrastructures to all blade customers.

If you are an IT solutions provider, there’s no need to ask your customer’s CIO and CFO to buy new gear in order to continue their quest for full data center modernization, which is a tough pill to swallow. Allow them to use what they have.

In recent months, partners from all over the globe have joined with Egenera to bring evolutionary data center modernization to their customers.

If you haven’t investigated Egenera yet, but you have a strong blade or data center modernization practices, please contact me.