Yesterday, the Wikibon community heard from Cal State U East Bay’s Rich Avila. He, like other guests on Wikibon, including BT’s Michael Crader, have cited the benefits of combining server and storage virtualization. Yet numerous customers we speak with don’t virtualize storage arrays under VMware.

Industry data from IDC and Forrester over the past few years clearly shows EMC dominates in virtualized server environments as the backend storage platform of choice. The data ranges from 40% to close to 50% market share. Clearly these EMC arrays are not sitting behind Invista so one can only assume the capacity of these arrays is not virtualized. Folks like 3PAR of course would say that this is a missed opportunity– once you try a fully virtualized platform under VMware you’ll see the advantages and won’t go back.