And the same percentile again (95%) said that storage area networks already form (30%) - or will form in the next 12 months (65%) - part of their virtualised infrastructure. One of the storage exposition and conference planned keynote speakers, John Abbot, founder and chief analyst with The 451 Group, said that the most significant change that virtualisation brings to the mix is the isolation of workloads from the underlying hardware.

This translates, he says, to enhanced flexibility and the removal of the need to implement and maintain a single, uniform platform, resulting in significantly reduced costs, due to lower redundancy and higher utilisation.

According to Mr Abbott, whilst the added complexity at the planning stage of virtualisation can act as a barrier to new business, "once users gain more confidence in the emerging set of new tools, then sales will accelerate. When properly implemented, virtual infrastructures can form the basis of automated backup, retention, business-continuance and disaster-recovery processes."

Careful planning, however, he said, is required to achieve the best value for money.

"For instance, many secondary applications could get by with the 'good enough' capabilities of VMware High Availability," he explained.

Virtualisation predictions
Mr Abbot makes the interesting prediction that - over the next 12 to 18 months - the virtualisation market will change.

Current vendors, he said, must adapt to these changes. Fortunately, he says, most of them have already moved beyond a focus on local high availability toward remote availability and disaster recovery.

"Although VMware is still the dominant player by far, it's a certainty that Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat will gain significant market traction," he explained.

It's against this backdrop that Mr Abbot said that cloud-based disaster recovery services represent an opportunity for vendors.

It is, however, he said, unlikely this type of business will go to the consumer-oriented cloud services such as Amazon and Google.

"Traditional hosting vendors like SunGard are already moving in, targeting small businesses that are virtualising their primary sites but haven't had the resources to set up their own remote disaster-recovery site," he explained.

Mr Abbot will be joined by three other industry professionals - Roger Bearpark, assistant head Of IT with the London Borough Of Hillingdon; Neil Edmonds, systems specialist with The Salvation Army and David Weston, IT infrastructure manager with the Oxford University Press - to give a keynote on disaster recovery.

Entitled `Break Point: Disaster Recovery & The New Availability,' the must-attend keynote will look at how IT systems can be made more resilient and less prone to failure.

Storage Expo, which takes place at London's Olympia on October 14/15, seeks to answer many of the virtualisation and disaster recovery questions that hard-pressed IT managers are asking.

With two days of stimulating and thought provoking seminars that reflect the needs of today’s data storage professionals and information management experts, Storage Expo 2009 gives you the chance to improve and update your storage and information management strategies

Sessions that focus on Virtualisation, Disaster Recovery or SANs include:

SAN Optimisation Best Practices: Seeing Through The Clouds Of Virtulisation - Mike Royle, IT Director, Enterprise Services, Unilever – Speaking on behalf of Virtual Instruments

The Dangers Lurking In A Virtual Environment - Kevin Moreau, General Manager (UK & Ireland), Acronis

Online Business Continuity - Its About Recovery NOT Just Backup - Steve Evans, Operations Director, Smartways Technology Limited

Online Business Continuity - Its About Recovery NOT Just Backup - Mr. Steve Evans, Operations Director, Smartways Technology Limited
For more on Storage Expo: http://www.storage-expo.com

About Storage Expo
Storage Expo 14th – 15th October, Olympia, London, is the UK’s definitive event for data storage, information and content management and provides visitors with the opportunity to compare the most comprehensive range of solutions and services from all the leading suppliers.  The unrivalled education programme will also enable you to learn how to address today’s key issues with expert advice from a wide range of industry experts and peers. 

With the sheer rate of data growth, organisations increasingly have to look at not only how they store data, but also how they manage and protect all kinds of information, from its creation, through to archiving and final destruction. Visiting Storage Expo will help you discover the most effective tools and methods to meet your storage, information and content management needs.

For further information, please visit www.storage-expo.com