Virtualization is a hot topic these days and this was evidenced last week at the VMworld Summit in San Francisco. Sendmail was an exhibitor at VMworld, and while we were there, we conducted a survey of VMworld participants to gain insight into the decisions their companies have made around migrating email infrastructures to virtualized environments. Our survey also sought to uncover the key trends around benefits and limitations that have influenced their organization’s decisions when it comes to virtualizing email systems.
We had the opportunity to survey more than 200 participants at the event and ask them specific questions regarding which layers of their email infrastructure have been virtualized, and what the benefits and limitations were that factored into their decision to virtualize all or part of their email infrastructure. Some of the key findings from this survey that we want to share include:
- 56% of companies have migrated components of their email infrastructure to a virtualized environment.
- 59% of respondents said that increased Server Utilization and High Availability / Failover Support are the top benefits when deciding to migrate their email infrastructure to a virtualized environment, while 45% of respondents cited Performance/Throughput as the number one potential limiting factor.
- 87% of those surveyed said their companies’ goals and expectations were met and/or exceeded by migrating components of their email infrastructure to a virtualized environment.
Overall, these findings are reflective of what many of our Global 2000 customers have experienced when considering moving components of their email infrastructure to a virtualized environment. When faced with concerns over security and system performance in order to improve the efficiency and availability levels of their message delivery operations in a virtualized environment, our enterprise customers selected Sentrion Virtual Message Processor (MPV) to meet their messaging virtualization goals without sacrificing messaging security.
For more info on our VMworld survey results, and other developing trends in IT virtualization, check out some of the relevant media coverage that resulted from the VMworld Summit last week: IT Holding Back on Virtualizing Business-Critical Apps By David Needle, VMWorld Survey Highlights Real-World Practices By James Powell, and E-Mail Systems Starting to Land More on Virtual Servers by Mike Vizard.