For healthcare organizations and their IT departments, almost everything is mission critical, from patient information to registration systems and records management. Information needs to be readily available and data has to protected at all times to avoid compliance risk or calamitous consequences.

From what we’ve seen, the interest in virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery is driven by two key factors: cost savings and greater demand for 24×7 availability of health records. Like so many organizations in this tough economy, health care providers are under tremendous pressure to deliver the same quality services at lower cost. Using server virtualization for server consolidation can help. And the VMotion and XenMotion capability in VMware and XenServer respectively can provide these organizations with DR that is significantly easier to deploy and execute. On top of XenServer they can add everRun VM for fault tolerant, high availability protection that is much more affordable and practical than what they have had in the past.

Testament of the increased interest in virtualization from healthcare organizations comes from our own experiences here at Marathon. We’ve seen a positive uptake in healthcare customers who are deploying everRun VM to protect their virtual environments. Currently, about 30% of new customers that are in Marathon’s pipeline for sales are in the healthcare related space. We can only assume that the number of healthcare customers we service will continue to grow as we venture into 2009.

The changes these organizations are making are allowing them to stay ahead of the competition as they increase efficiency, ensure the availability of patient records and most importantly set the standard for inpatient and outpatient care.

Are you part of a healthcare organization that is starting to deploy server virtualization? Is more effective HA and DR a key goal?

As a result of economic turbulence, companies of all sizes continue to explore virtualization as an option for shedding costs. With the growing number of virtualization options available, it’s important not to let your organization fall victim to virtualization buzzwords. Not all vendors offer the benefits of virtualization, yet many claim they do.

With that being said, when deciding which solution to implement within your organization, IT decision makers should be prepared with an arsenal of questions to ask each provider – doing so will eliminate the typical “fluff” vendors use to sell their supposed virtualization solutions. Having all your questions answered will ensure that you get the most appropriate and highest quality solution for the applications you wish to protect. The following is a list of questions that might assist IT professionals in making their virtualization-related decisions, and some other considerations we offer:

These are just a few examples that should help get the conversation going. Has anyone deployed a virtual environment that wasn’t the right fit? What were the repercussions and what needed to be done to correct it?

If anyone has any questions they wish they had asked prior to purchasing, please leave them in the comments below and we will be sure to add them to the list.

Everyone is well aware of the recent market turbulence and the pressure this will put on corporate spending. The economic situation is going to have an effect on every aspect of business action. However, despite budget cuts, I think that the increase in virtualization adoption will continue unabated. Here are a few things I expect:

• Since the beginning of 2008, the virtualization industry has seen changes in its landscape. Microsoft’s Hyper-V introduction has made a lot of noise, as more and more customers are seeing and trying it for themselves. One of the big draws for Hyper-V is its price point. In this market, its price will continue to make it an attractive solution. In fact, I believe the price will dip even further by year’s end, keeping it in consideration for enterprises as other solutions are ditched to shore up costs. As additional vendors support Hyper-V it will only become easier for companies to evaluate, justify, and acquire the solution.

• I believe that not only will Hyper-V demand continue, but people will also begin to adopt more than one hypervisor. Almost all companies have more than one operating system or hardware platform. Since IT departments are adapt at integrating heterogeneous technologies, it is only natural for companies to mix and match hypervisors to solve the specific challenges they have while meeting budget requirements.

• In general, many of the companies that made initial virtualization-related purchases capitalized on its “low-hanging fruit.” Most Fortune 1000 companies have already completed relatively low risk actions and virtualized applications like dev and test systems and file and print. Moving forward, I think that customers will now want to implement virtualization on more of their mission-critical applications. Applications like Exchange and SQL, which both have growing needs for high availability solutions.

• Expect the interest level and the actual deployment of both higher-end availability technology and sophisticated management tools, and the infrastructure that surrounds that, to quickly ratchet up. This will allow people to complete the first phase of adoption and will begin a speedier move towards mainstream inclusion of virtual technology in data centers.

How do you think the rest of the year will play out in the virtualization industry? Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts; I’m interested to hear the insights of others.

VMworld 2008 is an essential event for any IT professional looking for the latest products and innovations in virtualization technology – and we are readily preparing to demonstrate what we’ve got.

As a result of increased adoption and further consolidation, the virtualization market has grown tremendously, increasing the spectrum of presenters and attendees alike. Based on this growth, I expect to see more value-add products, more new start-ups and technologies. In previous years, the attention has been on hypervisors. Now, I think the emphasis will be on tools and layered products that sit on top of the hypervisor, such as availability, management and monitoring tools.

Are you a VMworld Rookie? Here’s a tip – Past shows have left me feeling that a lot of vendors make grand claims regarding their products and services, but many are still very early in the development stage. Everyone uses similar buzzwords – business continuity, disaster recovery, high availability, management, etc. These are all fairly broad terms and vendors use some form or hybrid of each at their booths and in their presentations to lure you in to hear “the pitch.” Finding solution providers who have real customers, products, references, and established technology is a much more productive approach when attending the event.

When it comes down to it, a lot of past VMworld happenings involve the issue of hype vs. reality. The challenge for anyone who is going to walk the halls, talk to vendors, and attend sessions is the ability to validate what is reality vs. what is hype.

I’ll be attending several sessions at VMworld, but I am most eager to attend the session where VMware will announce their fault-tolerant technology. I think that will be a beneficial session to all event attendees. Our assumption at Marathon is that it will be something like a fault management or fault handling system –something on a similar level to what we do. But this is definitely an advantage for us – it helps to validate what we have been saying for 18 months. As the market leader in virtualization, VMware sees the same problem as Marathon – customers need and are requiring more protection for applications that get consolidated. Traditional failover environments aren’t sufficient for the higher value applications.

If you have any recommendations for VMworld sessions, please leave me a comment and let me know – I’m always open for suggestions. And if you have any questions or if you see me walking around, don’t hesitate to reach out - I’d love to connect with you.

A few week’s ago I wrote about virtualization in large enterprises – chronicling conversations I’ve had with Fortune 100 CEOs and CIOs. Following Jerry’s Mid-Market podcast, I thought I would chime in with my thoughts on virtualization in the Mid-Market; especially since the introduction of products like Hyper-V will increase mainstream adoption at the Mid-Market level significantly.

Mid-Market companies have completely different drivers for adopting virtualization than the larger companies. The key question for Mid-Market level CIOs is “can I consolidate everything?” Most large companies have the ability to segment out the applications they want to virtualize and allocate the appropriate staff to pull it off in a phased approach. Mid-Market companies lack that luxury. They are often times short staffed and have little resources to conduct this sort of deployment. And in many cases, if they can’t consolidate all of the apps, the return doesn’t pencil out.

Why haven’t more Mid-Market companies deployed server virtualization?

One of the first and foremost concerns on the mind of Mid-Market CIO’s I’ve talked to is that they want to be sure that they are going to be able to get and provide the same service as before. Keeping business critical applications like Exchange and SQL up and running, not only effects employees, but also customers and partners as well.

Another major concern which has prohibited Mid-Market companies from deploying is the idea that there are specialized skills required to maintain a virtual environment. This should not be a concern. While some virtualization platforms do require specialized IT skills, new platforms such as Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V can realistically be deployed without an army of IT folks or a lot of specialized virtualization skills.

If you’re a Mid-Market company facing a virtualization hurdle, leave me a comment here. We would gladly dive-in to see if we can help you get over it.

Virtualization has saturated the market in terms of awareness, but implementation of this highly efficient technology is still reserved for early adopters. After many months of being the media darling, virtualization has only managed to infiltrate about 10% of Fortune 100 businesses. Should we be concerned at the rate businesses are adopting virtualization?

Through recent discussions with Fortune 100 CEOs and CIOs, it is evident that the past 12 months have been the proving grounds for virtualization. Industry leaders that I have talked to from the Financial, Pharmaceutical, Media and Broadcasting space recognize that the value of virtualization goes beyond just cost savings. The real strategic driver of virtualization is the ability to deploy new applications in hours instead of months; which can translate into drastically shrinking the time to market for new products and services.

Over the next 12 months, that 10% will certainly grow as more and more large enterprises see the value on their bottom line, improvement in business processes and the acceleration of new products and services. We’ll see more integration, customization and validation as time goes on. Even though most of the Fortune 100 has already deployed some virtualization, the opportunity for growth is astounding. One Pharmaceutical company I spoke with plans to virtualize 80% of its applications by 2012…starting now.

The rate at which large enterprise businesses are starting to adopt virtualization technology is about to reach the tipping point. We’re excited to be part of the process, by developing solutions that help large enterprises gain the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications.