With server virtualization having entered the computing mainstream, Heena Jhingan explores the prospects of virtualization in all its forms—server, storage and desktop
“Simplification, dynamic provisioning of resources and non-disruptive data mobility are the top three reasons as to why organizations are investing in virtualization solutions. These unique capabilities translate to cost reduction in the range of 40-60% and customers are starting to see Return on Investment in less than 12 months,” reasoned Vivekanand Venugopal, VP & GM, India, Hitachi Data Systems.
New flavors
Most large enterprises that made early moves toward virtualization, now have experience in handling virtual servers. Most are now asking the big question as to what is next.
Naveen Mishra, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner pointed out that the people who were early investors in server virtualization, were looking for newer areas where this technology could bear results in 2011 and the second half of the year saw virtualization grow beyond servers reaching the storage and application layers.
He said that, in 2011, even the mid-market started investing on virtualization, mostly triggered by server consolidation. Owing to increasing storage compute environments, storage virtualization looks like being the next big thing for the mid-market, given their business agility.
Server virtualization is an established concept in the Indian market “Last year, about 60% of machines were virtualized in India, and data center growth is expected to be about 20% this year, which indicates that that there is a huge scope for virtualization in the storage space. From the storage perspective, the enterprises are focusing on aligning virtualization concepts with storage arrays. There is a stress on integrating server and storage virtualization,” said Shuja Mirza, Regional Presales Head, North, EMC.
However, due issue around interoperability and the complexities involved, managing these environments is difficult.
“In order to get over such hassles, we opened up our APIs for storage vendors,” said BS Nagarajan, Country SE Manager, VMware.
Meanwhile desktop virtualization has been getting a lot of buzz.
Rajesh Rege, Senior Vice President – Data Center, Virtualization and Cloud business, India & SAARC, Cisco believed that though adoption remained sluggish with the uptake of virtual desktops being mostly because of ease of infrastructure management in terms of upgrades and maintenance, a significant shift is occurring in desktop space and we can expect a large virtual desktop footprint in India going forward.
Mirza explained that in times to come, virtual desktops would continue to gain ground. “A concept that was earlier considered to be associated with cost management, mostly on the OPEX side, now makes more sense as in an milieu where we see consumerization of IT and enterprises becoming liberal with the idea of Bring Your Own Device,” he said
As per Rajesh Awasthi, Director – Telco and Cloud Business, NetApp India, a large number of enterprises, who were looking at compliance on desktops, especially the ones operating in the IT/ITES space, were increasingly investing in these solutions.
Enterprises today, according to Robert Healey, Marketing Evangelist, APAC, Riverbed Technology, are looking to boost performance in a number of ways. IT users want fast applications, IT staff want better security and control and the CFO wants superior efficiency and return on their IT investments.
These are the major factors that are driving consolidation and virtualization initiatives and these factors are also driving significant interest in Cloud-based IT services, for applications, platforms and storage.
He stressed that the success of virtualization projects, whether for server infrastructure or for virtual desktop services, is directly related to application performance across the enterprise WAN. Enterprises in India face the challenge of connecting users and data across large geographies, where WAN connectivity is typically expensive and low-speed. In these environments, virtualization projects are almost guaranteed to fail, unless users also plan to implement WAN optimization at the same time.
“As IT consolidation and virtualization continues to grow, WAN optimization becomes a mandatory technology for enterprises to use to address the performance challenges associated with centralized computing models servicing remote users. As these IT service models continue to evolve, WAN optimization technology must also continue evolving in step to offer optimization services for these new IT delivery models,” Healey viewed.
Virtualization is the basic step toward convergence. Anna Gong, Vice President, Solution Sales, Virtualization, Service Automation, and Cloud, CA Technologies Asia Pacific, said, “ We have seen converged fabrics like VCE vBlock, Cisco UCS, and Netapp Flexpod picking up speed as businesses aim to drive cost efficiency, service quality, and agility. What we have seen is that many IT organizations are investigating or actively building private Clouds by using management tools to transform virtualization into Cloud services enabling them to more quickly and efficiently meet business demand with services that scale in and out across a shared pool of resources.
Awasthi explained that the decision to virtualize is basically made on two fronts namely how critical the business is and the operational excellence of the application. Most vendors have been positioning the solution in a way such that the applications that rank high on the business criticality factor would require a siloed approach.
Virtualization ready and aware
Application virtualization has been around a while, however, there is big shift in the way that the application layer is being virtualized. As a traditional practice, the CIOs were hesitant to put mission-critical applications in a virtual environment. Awasthi observed that was not the case anymore. He said the enterprises that reached a comfort level with virtualization are now comfortable talking about migrating tier one applications such as ERP, CRM, databases and unified communications on to a virtual platform.
Awasthi pointed that in case of Indian enterprises too, we can see that almost 25% of applications are moved to the virtualized environment.
Mirza of EMC noted that the pace at which virtualization is catching up with enterprises, some years down the line, there will be more virtual servers than physical ones. Some enterprises are even adopting it as a policy to choose applications that are better suited for a virtualized environment.
Virtualization is definitely what the majority of enterprises are working on or talking about. “Consolidation, virtualization and then the Cloud is the natural progression for enterprises. Out of 10 large enterprises, seven have already consolidated and others are on the way. Out of these seven, at least five to six are doing virtualization and the rest are talking about it,” corroborated Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager, Information management software group, IBM India/ South Asia.
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Managing the sprawl and complexities
Server virtualization is now a mature concept even in the Indian market, now the impetus is on the other levels of storage and desktop. Most importantly, virtualization is not a one time implementation, it is a gradual process. In India, we predominantly see a hybrid environment where physical and virtual machines co-exist.
Till a few years back virtualization was considered to lead to complexities, with an additional layer to manage. Anna Gong, Vice President, Solution Sales, Virtualization, Service Automation, and Cloud, CA Technologies Asia Pacific, said, “We have seen organizations experience virtual server sprawl where resources are abundant and wasted. IT organizations will then need a separate solution to manage these kinds of complexities, especially now that a heterogeneous environment, consisting of physical and virtual servers and desktops. When virtualization is implemented, security must be planned and factored into the architecture and standards. However, most organizations do not plan well in advance by factoring security as one of the biggest requirements before investing in virtualization, therefore complexities arise.”
Studies also find that just because a company’s infrastructure is virtualized, it doesn’t mean that it is fully utilized. Gong said, “The enterprises may be only utilizing 40% of the invested resources, leaving 60% untouched. With these caveats and complexities of adopting virtualization, India may be taking a more careful approach in further reviewing the consequences of the adoption of virtualization. In 2012, however, India will have seen many companies that have succeeded and failed in this space. With this experience and a detailed plan or methodology, companies will be better equipped to adopt virtualization and have a higher success rate.
The key trends in this space are data center transformation projects, with server and resource consolidation, the need for capacity management, and process orchestration to achieve a more dynamic, agile, and cost-effective data center. This is part of the big private Cloud movement in large and medium enterprises. The need to deliver quicker and more services to their customers with less or the same IT budget will fuel growth in virtualization and Cloud adoption.
The industry will see more virtual desktops, virtual storage, and infrastructure as a service in 2012 for the reasons of driving efficiencies, agility, and productivity across the organizations. Once visualization takes off, there’s the need for integrated services, between infrastructure, application and services. This presents another complicated phase of evaluating a new set of solutions to optimize your investments, how an organization models, assembles, assures, automates, and secures the physical, virtualized, and hybrid environments is key to achieving a highly efficient business service delivery model.
Venugopal was of the opinion that virtualization took a long time to take off in India as most enterprises adopted server Virtualization projects in isolation and most enterprises lacked an understanding of data center cost metrics. India being a price-sensitive market had found virtualization to be an expensive affair.
Amal Bhattacharya, GM, Networking, Wipro Infotech, said that virtualization required long term TCO analysis and management support for temporary hiccups in implementation as well as operations. “The availability of skilled resources in the operation of virtualized environment is a major deterrent. Security in virtualized environment also seems to be something, which needs further maturity and simplicity,” he added.
The Cloud is expected to take Virtualization to the next level for things like automating the composition and management of virtualized resources, desktop virtualization and even production and life cycle virtualization.
Interestingly, in 2011 analysts saw a lot of SMBs, typically with about over 200 employees evaluating virtualization as an option, which they had been very conservative about.
The road ahead
The outlook for the Virtualization market is clear. It will see many projects being implemented and large enterprises that have already implemented server virtualization, will look at the next level. Data growth will give an impetus to the adoption of storage virtualization.
Awasthi said, Cloud last year was in nascent stage, but in 2012, it will come out in a more matured way. “Cloud will write ABC of the trends—analytics, bandwidth requirements and content,” he said.
Vendors will invest more in raising awareness among customers and developing software tools that will simplify management of virtualized environment.
heena.jhingan@expressindia.com