Virtualization is becoming an increasingly important concept among the IT managers of various medium-sized and large companies nowadays, simply because this technology could actually prove to save a lot of money (not to mention a lot of electrical power) in the future. And since this particular branch has become such a major area of interest, there are already a large number of players on the international IT market that are taking some very serious steps in this direction.

Softpedia has been invited to attend a meeting, presided by Mr. Mihai Guran, Dell's country manager for Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Mr. Serban Zirnovan, Enterprise Business Manager for Romania and Bulgaria, in which the company has presented the very interesting results of a study carried out by Infiniti Research on behalf of Dell and AMD, a market study regarding the way in which virtualization is regarded (or, for that matter, adopted) on emerging markets.

For starters, let's see some details regarding the study itself. It targeted CIOs/senior IT managers in various companies from 9 emerging countries, mainly Romania, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and UAE. And the results were pretty astounding, to say the least.

Thus, among all of these countries, the importance of virtualization is rated as very high, with a notable low in South Africa (where 17% considered it to be completely unimportant). Moreover, most of the respondents have already initialized some sort of virtualization implementation, with half of the activities being scheduled to take place at some point during the next 12 months.

Additionally, the study also revealed that some of the most important benefits of virtualization are, according to most respondents, the simplification of the backup recovery process, an increased level of security for the users' data, as well as reduced server sprawl (58 percent) and lower hardware and maintenance costs (at around 55 and 56 percent, respectively).

Another very important conclusion, this time related to hardware (AMD's side of this study) revealed that most IT managers consider quad-core processors to be the best bet for virtualization machines. Moreover, most of the respondents consider that it's better to use a single vendor for both server and storage consolidation, an issue from which Dell could really benefit in the future.