More Than 50% of Organizations Evaluating iSCSI in UK

According to an independent survey undertaken in the UK by Double-Take Software, organisations are continuing with their IT migration projects despite the current economic climate. With server, storage and virtualisation migrations representing an already significant investment, companies are looking for ways to reduce the overall amount of time that they spend on migrating systems, as well as preventing downtime during moves.
 
Of the survey’s 158 respondents, 46 percent have at least one migration project to be completed during 2009. Migrations are classed as including physical server refreshes, storage migrations or implementations of virtualisation. Of those that are migrating their systems, physical server replacements were the most common projects to be undertaken, with 37 percent of companies carrying them out. Virtualisation projects were the next most common (26 percent of migrations), followed by virtual and physical server migrations together (11 percent) and storage migrations (10 percent). Only eight percent of respondents were carrying out a full data centre migration including physical server, storage and virtualisation roll-outs.
 
iSCSI storage is also proving to be of interest to organisations that are looking to reduce their spending on IT: more than half of respondents (51 percent) were either evaluating the technology or planning to implement iSCSI storage this year, while 19 percent had already implemented. The remaining 30 percent stated that they would not be considering iSCSI. However, most respondents were not aware of how iSCSI and booting from SAN could potentially reduce their IT costs, particularly around desktop support – only 21 percent of respondents had considered the technology.
 
“The problems that organisations are facing around IT migrations are due to cost and downtime, even though new technologies such as virtualisation can provide substantial efficiencies and savings. These moves have to be essential to the success of the business in order to be carried out, but the impact on end-user productivity can be considerable without the right planning and support in place,” said Ian Masters, sales and marketing director UK and Ireland, Double-Take Software. “There is also a significant cost when moves have to be performed outside work hours through paid overtime or employees giving up their free time. Organisations are looking for more effective tools to support their migration projects, as well as providing better value back to the business when it comes to protecting assets.”
 
Double-Take Software provides workload optimisation solutions that make it easier for businesses to move, protect and recover their IT workloads. With Double-Take Move, organisations can both shrink the potential window of downtime, as well as moving workloads across any server, storage or virtualisation platform. “We are looking to help organisations make their migrations easier, as well as protecting workloads as they are migrated. Secondly, our technology approach means that applications and services don’t have to be taken down while a migration is in progress – this avoids a significant amount of planned downtime that would otherwise affect business productivity,” said Masters. “Overall, we want to help businesses get to the benefits of their new technology investments faster and speed up return on investment.”
 
The survey, carried out by eMedia on behalf of Double-Take Software, covered a range of vertical markets and company sizes, with all those surveyed based in the UK. The total number of respondents was 158.