Rackspace Unveils Virtualization Study

August 15, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Managed hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting (rackspace.com) announced on Monday that a recent customer survey it conducted reveals that virtualization is ready to support mission-critical applications. The survey showed that 57 percent of respondents are already using virtualization for internal applications, and 72 percent of respondents are comfortable hosting mission-critical applications in a production environment on a virtualized platform.Â

The survey unveiled a great demand for using virtualization through a third-party hosting company. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they would host their applications on a virtualized infrastructure with a hosting provider, however, the majority of customers are currently not comfortable using a shared, virtual environment. Only 13 percent of respondents are confidently willing to share a physical server with other hosting customers, a practice common in hosting, with top concerns stemming from performance and security vulnerabilities in shared environments.

"The first phase of virtualization has focused on cost savings from server consolidation, but the next phase will be about infrastructure management to improve flexibility and scalability," says Nicolas Keller, director of platform products at Rackspace Managed Hosting. "Hosting providers and utility players, like Rackspace, that manage tens-of-thousands of customer servers, need to deliver a virtualization platform that provides fast provisioning and infrastructure agility for our customers."

Rackspace says it plans to unveil a virtualization offering, which is currently in the beta process, to address the management of large-scale implementations as well as the needs and concerns that have been revealed through this survey. The customer survey also revealed that 42 percent of respondents believe virtualization will have a fundamental impact on information technology, and while 43 percent had no preference between using open source or proprietary virtualization products, the majority of respondents use VMware.

Rackspace announced last week that it will invest $100 million to turn a vacant San Antonio, Texas shopping mall into its new headquarters, and plans to add 4,000 new employees over the next five years.