Virtual Technology Industry Analysis

Here's a pretty awesome analysis of virtual tech customers compiled by Forrester.  Here are the highlights:

• Figure 1: VMware is dominating.  93% of virtual tech customers have VMware.
• Figure 2: In the rough economy, SAN customers are focused on:
• Space utilization (efficiency): 53%
• Cost: 39%
• Performance: 30%
• Figure 3: SAN vendor.  
• 44% EMC 
• 38% NetApp
• 24% HP/Lefthand
• 22% IBM.
• 67% of customers have only one storage vendor in their datacenter.  I think that this is because only the bigger players can afford to create price competition in their environment, or perhaps only they really benefit enough in pricing to make it worth their while maintaining two or more products.
• Figure 5: Protocol:
• 76% FC
• 37% NFS (up from 18% two years ago)
• 23% iSCSI

Notice on the second bullet (customer focus), both 1 and 2 are about cost.  Customers understand that a higher dollar amount can save money in the long run using dedup, great snapshot management, and overall space efficiency.  This also reflects the tough economy, and predicts skinnier margins for the storage industry.

http://media.netapp.com/documents/ar-storage-choices-for-virtual-server-environments.pdf