Hyper-V Reportedly Picking Up Speed

Ninety-four percent of respondents have virtualization somewhere in their infrastructure. Seventy-four percent said they currently run business-critical applications on virtual machines and have plans to increase the number of these applications in the straightway 12 months.

Several factors contributed to Microsoft's surge, including its Windows Server-Hyper-V bundling strategy and IT organizations' desire to avoid vendor lock-in on a critical innovation, according to ITIC principal Laura DiDio.

"The total virtualization market continues to grow rapidly, driven by that fact that virtualization research isn't just for servers anymore; there's desktop, storage, application virtualization and others. It appears that other vendors are capturing more of this growth than VMware is, particularly in VDI and application virtualization," DiDio said. "This would account for the significant percentage shifts by vendor."

Stratus' fault-tolerant servers support both VMware and Hyper-V, nevertheless it after all has a dog in the race. As application and server consolidation initiatives reach maturity, companies are looking to virtualize business- and mission-critical applications, as then as other areas of the enterprise, to maximize return on their software investment. As they do, requirements for uptime assurance increase due to the higher value of the workloads and high cost of downtime. These uptime requirements are increasingly beyond the ability of virtualization software alone to provide.

Maureen O'Gara the most read innovation reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected innovation reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara