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05 November 2012, 14:29

Cloud use surveyed by IDC sees the private cloud ascendant

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The Linux Foundation opened LinuxCon Europe 2012 with a nine-page IDC white paper which looks at the cloud plans of US companies. According to IDC's research, the 282 companies surveyed intend to increase the number of servers in their private cloud infrastructure from 15% now to around 45% in five years time. Within two years, the survey sees the use of bare-metal servers, virtualised servers and private cloud servers at the same level, with around 33% each. The survey also found that 47% of customers prefer to use their existing hypervisor, leaving 53% of the market open to adopting a new cloud platform's integrated hypervisor.

Private Cloud takeup results
Zoom The respondents view of the rise of private clouds
Source: Linux Foundation

The respondents expected that around 63% of the applications running on the cloud will be existing applications and that many of those will be closed source. The analysis says this suggests that open source cloud platforms will need to work with both proprietary and open source environments. Collaboration and a "vibrant open source ecosystem" were rated as somewhat important or very important by 94% of the respondents.

Interestingly, the highest-rated attribute of an open cloud was the ability to port and access data, followed by the option to run the platform on-premises and then the ability to participate in the community developing the cloud technology. These were followed by supporting open APIs, running on Linux, being built on open standards to make a top 5 requirements. Also interestingly, least important was the ability to port and "access my applications" between cloud platforms. IDC suggests that this is because the long lifetimes of enterprise applications which tend to stay on one platform for that lifetime, though it may be, it says, because "many enterprises have just abandoned the idea of easily portable applications".

The companies participating in the survey have either deployed or were interested in deploying a private cloud and were distributed over different company sizes, but SMBs with fewer than 500 employees were excluded. Copies of the report are available by signing up with name and email address on the Linux Foundation's publications page.

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(djwm)

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