Disaster recovery, server virtualization top IT budgets for '08

By Barbara Darrow, Senior News Editor 22 Jan 2008 | SearchITChannel.com

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According to a recent TechTarget survey of 606 North American IT professionals in small, medium-sized and large enterprises, disaster recovery (DR) and server virtualization were the top IT projects across all segments for the coming year.

More on IT budgets Data center mangers' demands rise faster than budgets As financial services sector trims IT spending, VARs step in Selling disaster recovery services to customers with reduced budgets

Asked which projects they will be involved with in the coming year, large companies -- those with over $1 billion in revenue -- cited DR, server virtualization, data governance and compliance. Companies with revenue of $100 million to $999 million ranked DR, server virtualization, business intelligence and compliance as major IT budget priorities, while companies with less than $100 million in revenue added endpoint security and network security to disaster recovery and server virtualization as their top four go-to projects for the year.

The disaster recovery choice is a no-brainer in an era of falling storage area network (SAN) storage costs and stricter data retention and archiving regulations, solution providers said.

The post-Sept. 11 tech shock forced companies and their channel partners to take a hard look at backup and recovery strategies, but since that time, the lessons have taken hold, and companies are being more proactive, solution providers said.

"DR and business continuity planning have been at the forefront since 9/11. But now, I think companies are looking at DR and realizing they can use it to enhance business opportunities and decrease downtime," said Ken Winell, CEO of ExpertCollab, a collaboration specialist based in Florham Park, N.J.

Falling prices in a transition from expensive Fibre Channel to less pricey iSCSI storage are helping drive faster adoption, as are better remote management technologies, solution providers said.

Some storage specialists are seeing customers escalate SAN installations that might have taken longer in the past. A customer who might have put in a single SAN, then another after a break, might now implement both SANs up front and replicate between them, said Scott Winslow, founder and CEO of Winslow Technology Group in Boston.

As managers set their IT budgets for the coming year, virtualization -- specifically server virtualization -- is absolutely top of mind, especially as businesses seek to consolidate expensive server hardware. The hope among solution providers is that money saved on hardware will end up flowing to more "value add" projects like custom application development, project management and collaboration.

"Everybody is either implementing VMware or looking to implement VMware," Winslow said. "Some are looking at Microsoft or Virtual Iron, but VMware has become almost the generic answer. It's almost like Xerox."

Server virtualization, in particular, now appears to be the cost of doing business, several solution providers said. Either it's already there as part of the platform they work on or it's on the short list of new technologies to be deployed in short order.

"That's just blocking and tackling -- you've got to have it," said Lee Blackstone, CEO of Blackstone & Cullen Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based application development, business intelligence and collaboration specialist. "In many accounts, virtualization is already spun up and we work on top of that, or we go back in later to change access codes and do other services."

Microsoft's new and very low-cost Hyper-V hypervisor is due later this year, and many partners expect that entry to spark even more interest in server virtualization among price-conscious smaller companies.

In press briefings this week, Microsoft executives cited IDC findings that just a tiny subset of servers are already virtualized as evidence of a huge partner opportunity. Despite all the hype, "just 5% or less of servers are virtualized today, and even fewer desktops or clients," Larry Orecklin, general manager of Microsoft's System Center, told SearchITChannel.com this week.

Of course, Microsoft is entering this fray in a big way with Windows 2008 and related Hyper-V offerings, and the company wants to play up the positive side of what most see to be growing contention with virtualization leader VMware.

When it came to the third IT budget priority line item, the three business segments diverged. Enterprise IT managers, perhaps still haunted by Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory mandates, listed "compliance" as their third top project for the year. Small companies listed network security, and midmarket companies chose business intelligence.

Absent from the top three IT budget priorities across the board were such hyped tech segments as "Web 2.0."

When respondents were asked which "specialty areas" they would put among their top three IT initiatives, 20% of database specialists listed disaster recovery, 14% compliance and 12% data governance.

Among networking specialists, 25% listed DR, 18% compliance and network security and 14% data governance.

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