New research is out from the leading big data and infrastructure firm Wikibon.org that is validating a  new trend is emerging that I have been following.  I call it Data Infrastructure.

Data infrastructure is about the new forces that are driving the crazy growth in applications and big data analytics which is redefining what used to be called Converged Infrastructure.   We will see this in action at VMworld next week in San Francisco.   One area is server virtualization which helps improve the utilization of physical resource.

In 2010, the research team at Wikibon mapped out the integration journey that the storage industry needs to complete to fix storage in VMware environments. Last year, Wikibon created a score card that measured how the big storage players are progressing on integrations with VMware. While all vendors try and claim that they have the most or best integrations, the leaders in the space are clearly EMC and NetApp. It is not enough that EMC is the majority owner in VMware; EMC puts a lot of resources into integrations to maintain leadership in the virtualization marketplace. Last year, a survey of users found that EMC and NetApp have mindshare that leads to increased marketshare in VMware environments. NFS integrations were a significant portion of vSphere 5 integrations, so it is no surprise that EMC VNX and NetApp benefit from the new integration points.

In the effort of continuing to simplify environments in the infrastructure, there is room for maturity in application management and transforming operations to support cloud (private/hybrid) environments.

New research: vSphere 5 Storage Integration Chips Away at Management Overhead

New Survey: Wikibon 2012 vSphere 5 Survey Shows Customer Satisfaction and Rapid Adoption

Many startups have emerged, looking to ride the waves of flash or converged infrastructure to attack the incumbent storage vendors. Some of these vendors have architected specifically for VMware environments in a simpler way that doesn’t require a long list of integrations.

The good news is that survey respondents are very positive about the vSphere 5 experience. 60% of respondents have vSphere 5 as the predominant version and a majority of users are at least 70% virtualized. While this is good news for VMware, it is notable that a majority of users are now running in a multi-hypervisor environment.

Recent VMware acquisitions of DynamicOps and Nicira point to VMware looking to control management of environments even as Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen gain footholds in VMware’s install base.

SiliconANGLE and Wikibon are your source for full coverage of VMworld 2012 in San Francisco. Watch a live video broadcast of theCUBE on SiliconANGLE.tv Monday through Wednesday, August 27-29.

Guests include VMware incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger, Co-President Tod Nielsen, CTO Steve Herrod, CIO Mark Egan, CMO Rick Jackson and a full slate of partners, customers, VCs and thought leaders. CEO guests include: Fusion-io’s David Flynn, Tintri’s Kieran Harty, Pure Storage’s Scott Dietzen, Nimbus Data’s Thomas Isakovich, Nutanix’s Dheeraj Pandey, VCE’s Praveen Akkiraj, Arista Network’s Jayshree Ullal, Nimble Storage’s Suresh Vasudevan, Service Now’s Frank Slootman, AppFog’s Lucan Carlson, Actifio’s Ash Ashutosh, Infineta’s Raj Kanaya, Tegile’s Rohit Kshetrapal and Proximal Data’s Rory Bolt. Thought leaders include Bromium’s Simon Crosby, Juniper’s Christofer Hoff, Dell’s Carter George, HP’s David Scott, NetApp’s Cynthia Stoddard, Big Switch’s Howie Xu, and many more.

Additional Survey Information: vSphere 5 Storage Adoption Study, and Customer Adoption of Multi-Hypervisor Environments