(Niel Nickolaisen, Contributor, TechTarget) Many midmarket CIOs now use virtualization for mission-critical servers. We are also using it to improve availability of critical services. Some are using it to redefine disaster recovery and business continuity. And as we get comfortable with a more virtual environment, some of us are starting to think about cloud computing.

Here are the details:
Mission-critical virtualization. In February, most midmarket CIOs had been reluctant to virtualize our mission-critical servers. Oh, there were a few of the bold and the brave who had virtualized their production database and Exchange servers, but most of us had not yet taken the plunge. Well, six months later, many of us have now taken that plunge. I spoke with one CIO who has now virtualized almost his entire server farm. This includes multiple Exchange servers (supporting thousand of email accounts), his Oracle database servers and his Citrix servers.

Virtualization for availability and DR/BC. Now that we are virtualizing our mission-critical, the-business-is-at-risk-if-they-fail systems, we are using virtualization features to improve the availability of our most critical services. About 25% of the CIOs I queried reported that they were using virtualization (both server and storage) to redefine how they handle disaster recovery and business continuity (DR/BC).