Hi, my name is Jim McCue and I serve as one of the Local Programming Liaisons for the Server Operations and Security Peer Group. I spent some time reading through ILTA’s 2011 Technology Survey Results and took a filtered view of the survey from the Server Operations point of view. I see some interesting trends, changes and challenges. Please don’t take this blog entry as a substitute for reading the Survey. There’s great info in there, and reading can be fun! At least so I’ve heard; I seem to get paper cuts every time I pick up paper these days. All opinions below are only my own and not reflective of ILTA’s or any of my colleagues. Do not step out of vehicle while it’s moving, etc. I think that takes care of any needed disclaimers….
I’ve always found these surveys useful, as I think we get a good sampling of what the membership is doing. 524 firms participated this year, roughly a good third of our membership. Considering that there’s a certain time investment to complete one, I think that really says a lot about our membership. My compliments to Todd Corham, Bob Forwalk, Clay Gibney and the rest of the ILTA staff who made this survey possible.
Virtualization is the norm, not the exception
At first glance, I was surprised by how many firms have now embraced server virtualization. A full 57% of firms are largely or completely virtualized, up from 28% in 2009 and besides that, 6% have virtualized most of their infrastructure servers. This means 63% - nearly two thirds of our membership is counting on virtualized servers for mission critical applications. This is a clear message to our server apps providers that you need to support virtualization if you want to stay in legal. I think for the most part they have met that challenge. Another statistic I found interesting from responses to the question “If your firm does user virtual server technology, please identify the software being used” was that while the total percentage of firms using VMware went from 94% to 85%, Hyper-V went from 16% to 11% and Xenserver went from 8% to 4%. Since you could choose multiple answers, I think this is a bit misleading. The total of the 2009 answers was 121% and the total of 2011 answers was 102%. I think this is more a reflection that firms have standardized on one virtual server technology and they’re sticking with what they’ve chosen. It does surprise me that Hyper-V and XenServer haven’t gained in market share.
Firms continue to move towards using or testing VDI. Firms working with this technology moved from 45% to 55% over the last year. 39% of firms are researching or testing, so while the number of firms rolling out or having implemented is rather small still it will be interesting to see how these numbers change over the next year. Look for VDI to be a really hot topic in ILTA education over the next year!
In the server hardware space, HP and Dell continue to dominate at 51% and 40% respectively. I do see a decent change in market share between HP and Dell, as HP went down from 61% in 2009 to 51% in 2011 and Dell went up from 35% to 40%. I imagine a good number of Dell’s gains were HP’s losses. Interestingly, Cisco UCS did not have enough market share to show above Other, which was at 4%. 25% of our firms use at least some blade servers, so look to see if they make the list in 2012. For primary file server OS, Windows 2008 had 56% and Windows 2003 had 39% in 2011, which seems similar to the Windows 2003 Server and 2000 Server breakdown we had in 2006. People seem to upgrade server OS at about the same rate and lag time.
SANs rule and e-mail mailboxes continues to be an IT headache
Related to the changes in server virtualization, in the SAN area 31% of firms didn’t use a SAN in 2009 while in 2011 it went down to 17%. I think this is due in part to the increase in virtualized servers, more firms wanting to use snapshots and replication to protect their data, the growth in disk based backups and the affordability of SANs in general. For SAN brands, for the most part it looks like firms stuck with the brand they’ve been using the last 3 years. For a single brand, EMC held their market share at 21%, the same as 2009. For a single company, Dell had the largest share at 25% when you count Dell, EqualLogic and Compellent together. Netapp grew from 10% in 2009 to 15% in 2011 and EqualLogic moved from 10% to 13%, representing the largest growth in market share. Not a huge change, considering the number of new SAN users we’ve added in the last 3 years.
In the E-mail arena, Exchange 2010 looks like it is taking hold now, with 25% if ILTA firms making it their primary e-mail platform, up from 4% on the 2010 survey. Having just done this upgrade, the performance and feature gains have really made it worthwhile for us. I thought it was really revealing that 70% of firms don’t limit mailbox size while mailbox size and archiving are listed as the top 2 biggest e-mail support challenges, at 40% and 33% respectively. While policies limiting incoming/outgoing e-mail size, filing of e-mail to the DMS and using archival software are technical attempts to deal with the mailbox size problems, clearly they haven’t solved that problem. So if 54% of firms are asking users to file e-mails to a DMS, are they really completely successful in getting them to do this? Are the automated auto-filing to DMS solutions working well?
The Survey: Get it; Read it
So that’s all I got; I encourage you to take some time and read the Survey for yourself. You can either download it from MyIlta (yes, you do need to remember your username and password) under Publications\White Papers\Surveys or you may have received a paper copy in the mail. You’re probably working on your budget for next year, and this is a great resource for justifying that new project you’ve aching to start.
Jim McCue, Rodey Law Firm
Local Programming Liaison, Server Operations and Security Peer Group