During the recent Network World 2005 IT Roadmap Tech Tour, Nemertes Research conducted a quick survey of conference attendees on their technology implementations. The findings, while far from statistically conclusive, are thought-provoking. Most enterprise organizations are approximately at the halfway point when it comes to virtualization and haven’t really plunged wholeheartedly into open source platforms and applications.

Just under half (48%) of respondents have storage-area networks (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) in full production today. Companies surveyed have an average of 18T bytes of data, but the median is 5T bytes - indicating a handful of companies with very large amounts of data and a majority having 10T bytes or less. Unsurprisingly, companies with more data are more likely to have deployed SAN and NAS. Nemertes advises companies with 5T bytes or above to investigate SAN and NAS; for companies with smaller amounts of data, these technologies are probably overkill. That said, for companies with enough data to merit it, SAN and NAS technologies can deliver astounding cost savings, including triple-digit percentage decreases in overall cost of ownership. (One industry-leading firm has a ratio of one technician to 35T bytes of data.)

Storage requirements are growing rapidly. Over 85% say they anticipate their storage requirements to increase by 10% or more over the next year, with 71% anticipating a growth rate of between 10% and 50%.
 
Just over a third (37%) say they’re using VMware today. VMware provides a layer of abstraction between the computing, storage and networking hardware and the software that runs on it, reducing overall costs and increasing CPU utilization. We recommend that IT executives seeking to lower costs in the data center make evaluating VMware a top priority.

Effectively deploying open source technologies is a real challenge. Fewer than 10% of respondents (9%) said they’re in full production mode with open source today. And while almost two-thirds (63%) say they’re evaluating, prototyping, or in limited production mode, many report concerns about finding the tech talent to manage and oversee open source projects. That’s not surprising. One CTO at a very large company - a member of the Nemertes Research IT Advisory Board - actually halted an open source deployment due to lack of talent.