Looking forward, it seems like more good news for virtualisation vendors, with many respondents to the survey feeling that virtualisation will remain a key trend for 2009.
One in five (23 percent) respondents said that businesses should review, consolidate and optimise their storage infrastructure to get more from their existing solution. Virtualisation was singled out as a technology that will enable businesses to achieve lower operational costs and a better return on assets.
Such is the confidence in virtualisation, that just under half (46 percent) view the next 12 months as the year when virtualisation comes of age, with existing virtualisation pilot projects turning into full-scale enterprise adoption.
"There is a difference between the uptake of server virtualisation and storage virtualisation," said Reid. "There is a lot of server virtualisation out there, but a lot of customers are not taking as much advantage of storage virtualisation as they can."
"For example, we are talking to customers trying to understand what that their content is (unstructured or structured). We even ran into some cases where some customers had unstructured data that was more than four years old, and hasn't been touched in four years. Moving it off to archive or second tier storage, where it can still be accessed, will be much more efficient."