30 Dec 2008

Firms plan server virtualisation in 2009

Businesses could look to expand upon their use of server virtualisation to help improve efficiency and cut costs over the next 12 months, a report has claimed.

According to a new survey by Afcom Data Centre Institute, 86 per cent of data centre managers are planning to adopt virtualisation technology to reduce the need for physical servers.

Meanwhile, a further 13 per cent intend to increase or add software-as-a-service as an alternative to internally-hosted applications.

The findings also revealed that just under half of data centre managers would be cutting their budgets next year in response to the economic crisis.

However, data centres remain important to businesses, with the remainder of those questioned indicating that their budgets would be either staying the same or increasing and many indicating plans to introduce new technologies such as cloud computing and virtualisation in 2009.

This comes after a survey by Hewlett Packard revealed that more than 80 per cent of technology businesses are intending to revamp their data centres within the next year.