UPDATE: New Container Adoption Survey Shows Enterprises Eager to Reduce Virtual Machine Licensing Costs


34% of respondents spend more than $250,000 on VMware licensing fees; 
44% seeking to replace some of their virtual machines with containers

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 31, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Diamanti, creators of the first bare-metal platform purpose-built for containerized applications, today released a 2018 Container Adoption Benchmark survey of 576 IT leaders. The report examines the current state of container adoption, evaluates technology choices in the container “stack,” explores the impact of containers on virtual machine infrastructure, and reveals high levels of enterprise dissatisfaction with VM licensing fees.

According to the survey data, enterprises are actively evaluating containers as a means to save hundreds of thousands of dollars by reducing their reliance on commercial virtualization technologies provided by VMware. More than two-fifths (44 percent) of respondents plan to replace some virtual machines with containers. Over half (55 percent) spend more than $100,000 annually on VMware licensing fees, and over one third (34 percent) spend more than $250,000 annually on VMware licensing fees.

“Enterprises have made substantial capital investments in virtualization and have years of experience managing virtual machines, so it’s natural that they would consider running containers within their existing virtualized environment,” said Jeff Chou, Diamanti CEO and co-founder. “But the early adopters who run containers on virtual machines have experienced additional management complexity, lower utilization and efficiency, and dramatically reduced performance. Plus, running more virtual machines means more VMware licensing costs.”

See Diamanti’s white paper Five Reasons You Should Run Containers on Bare Metal, Not VMs to learn more about why most organizations that try to run containers on VMs find this approach does not scale.

Other survey data suggests that as IT leaders are tasked to drive digital transformation, at the core of almost every one of those initiatives is some form of container technology. Most of that adoption is being driven not only by developers, but also IT leaders eager to position their organizations to take advantage of the next big shifts in enterprise IT.

The survey also reveals some of the stumbling blocks of the early adopters of containers. 30 percent of respondents running containers in production cite infrastructure as their “greatest challenge”, followed by security (22 percent), deployment (22 percent), performance (19 percent) and persistent storage (12 percent).

Other Key Findings (download the full report)
NOTE: In some cases the option to select all answers that apply can add up to more than 100% for any individual question.

  • Nearly half (47 percent) of IT leaders surveyed said they plan to deploy containers in a production environment, while another 12 percent say they already have.
  • Over a third of IT leaders (34 percent) adopting containers plan to allocate at least $100,000 to those projects in 2018.
  • The most widely-adopted container technologies are Docker (52%) and Kubernetes (30%)
  • 71 percent of respondents have deployed containers on a virtual machine, while 35 percent have deployed them on a public cloud, and 34 percent have deployed containers on a private cloud.
  • More than two-fifths (44 percent) of respondents plan to replace some virtual machines with containers. Over half (55 percent) spend more than $100,000 annually on VMware licensing fees, and over one third (34 percent) spend more than $250,000 annually on VMware licensing fees.

About Diamanti

Diamanti is the technology leader in bare-metal container infrastructure. Purpose-built for modern cloud and open-source environments, Diamanti’s container platform gives infrastructure architects, IT operations, and application owners the speed, simplicity, efficiency, and control they need to run stateful containerized applications in production. Based in San Jose, California, Diamanti is backed by venture investors CRV, DFJ, GSR Ventures, Northgate Capital, Translink Capital, and Goldman Sachs. For more information visit www.diamanti.com or follow @DiamantiCom.

Editorial Contact
Lonn Johnston for Diamanti
+1 650.219.7764
lonn@flak42.com