The ever increasing cost of data centres and installed infrastructure makes Virtualization a necessity. With enterprises exploring a ‘software defined’ approach, and only 10% of the installed infrastructure in the country being Virtualized, there is scope for high growth in the Virtualization sector in 2015
For the highly competitive travel industry, it is critical to deploy flexible IT solutions, which can meet the growing demands of consumers looking for easy to use online research and purchase options. The travel industry is highly competitive and busy travel portals such as MakeMyTrip need to develop efficient infrastructure. It is also important for them to have easy to use online interface. “When customers are searching for a particular travel package, they want highly targeted, quick results or they will go elsewhere,” says Sanjay Kharb, Vice President of IT, MakeMyTrip.com.
MakeMyTrip has consolidated its data centre on high-performance servers to outpace market growth within the expanding online travel sector in India. In this case virtualization was an obvious answer. The organisation has deployed Dell PowerEdge servers to consolidate its data centre infrastructure running the company’s private cloud. MakeMyTrip has experienced significant energy efficiency and space saving by maximising its compute power on Dell PowerEdge R910 and R610 servers. This efficiency is contributing significantly to the bottom line.
The volume of traffic that the site can now support has increased manifold. This enables the company to proactively pursue several new customers.
Virtualization’s high impact
According to IDC, the economic impact of server virtualization in India will reach $3.89 billion by 2020. The report from Gartner says that in 2015, 20% of the VPN/Firewall market will be deployed using virtual infrastructure and 100% of the IT security product capabilities will be delivered from the cloud. The Gartner report also states that virtualization has already surpassed 50% of all server workloads, and it will reach 86% in 2016.
In 2013, many organisations adopted virtualization and cloud computing technologies. In 2015, there is better realisation of the economic benefits of these technologies and now there is more interest from the customers.
Sajan Paul, Director, Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, says, “In 2015, software defined networking will move from niche technology to one that creates real business value. SDN will reach new levels of deployment as organisations embrace the technology and concepts to create agility in their cloud and data center environments. SDN will enjoy widespread adoption.” He is of the view that as much of the application deployment stack has already been automated, the network layer is an outlier in many organisations.
SDN enables automation and orchestration to remove the repetitive nature of deploying applications in the data center. A study done by Juniper, earlier this year, found an aggressive appetite for adopting SDN. A key use will be that SDN (coupled with analytics) provides the agility to provision (demanded) services before they are asked for rather than waiting until customers ask.
Paul is of the view that the market will see higher numbers of companies and organisations across a range of industries turn to the technology in 2015 to give them a business edge. Paul talks about SDN’s impending role in India, which is one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets and will remain so through 2020. Indian service providers (SPs) are investing heavily in 4G network, which is set to become critical for driving efficiency in enterprises. Customers like UBS, AT&T, Nike are already seeing the benefits of it.
According to the Forrsights survey in a Forrester report by Dave Bartoletti, improving business continuity and disaster recovery now tops the list of customer motivations for adopting virtualization. However, a simple exercise of virtualizing the infrastructure does not mean that it will be more resilient. Enterprises must also invest in new processes and tools to make virtual infrastructure always on and always available.
As the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), Software-defined networking, storage and security starts to mature, virtualization will witness a new upsurge. According to B S Nagarajan, “We are witnessing a pretty significant business transformation, where businesses are digitising, and their products and go-to-market strategies are changing. For IT, it is a question of how do all of the things they do to support their businesses change to keep up with and help drive the transformation.” VMware rolled out significant announcements in the region this year — the launch of EVO:RAIL at VMworld 2014 with Inspur in China and NOS in Japan; the expansion of vCloud Air in Australia and Japan.
An IDC whitepaper commissioned by VMware in October 2014, titled Empowering Organisations in a Software Defined World, says that the businesses in India have already avoided US$1.5 billion in CAPEX and will be able to avoid a further US$4 billion by 2020. Simply being able to virtualize some servers has a limited value, but when combined with a highly automated infrastructure, IT departments can deliver a degree of IT agility that the businesses require.
According to IDC, integrated infrastructure and platforms will grow 26% and reach US$1.47 billion in 2015.
Virtualization explores more
Surendra Singh, Regional Director, SAARC and India, Websense, says, ”Organisations are now not only looking at desktop virtualization from the point of cost requirement, they are also questing for benefits such as full data backup, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) support, extended hardware life cycles, security, compliance and anytime-anywhere access.” He says that India is going through an explosive growth in terms of virtual technology. In sectors like PSUs, banking, and finance there is widespread adoption of modern-day technology.
According to him an interesting trend is the Web-Scale IT, in which the companies mimic the infrastructure of cloud computing giants in their own data centres. Within the software-defined networking (SDN) trend, cloud services that are software-configurable through API calls, and applications with rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically, are becoming more prominent.
In today’s enterprise environment, security is a key issue. It becomes a key issue especially when workloads of different trust levels are consolidated onto a single physical server without sufficient separation. A growing number of employees are bringing their smart devices into the office. Unlike the corporate-issued laptops, many IT departments have no idea how many are accessing the network, what apps are being used and how much bandwidth is being consumed by these mobile devices, which have access to the highly vulnerable corporate data.
Paul of Juniper Networks says, “Architected for cloud computing, these new data centres are a combination of physical servers and virtual workloads. But virtualization also introduces a completely new set of security challenges, and this means that the data centre requires an even more pervasive range of security options.”
He adds that traditional network security appliances are blind to any communications between Virtual Machines (VMs) within a single host. This opens the potential for security attacks such as inter VM attacks; an attacker may compromise one virtual machine and then leverage that VM as a springboard to attack other VMs on the same host. The more VMs resident on a host, the more effective the potential attack. The attacker can also use a compromised VM to launch an attack on the hypervisor itself— this technique is known as hyper jacking. As the hypervisor is the critical piece of software that controls all of the VMs running on a single piece of hardware, it is a natural attack target.
Singh of Websense mentions, “Another key scenario is that the virtual environment is not as transparent as it claims to be. The user has no clue about how the information is being processed and stored. Also, there is no direct control over the flow of data/information storage and processing.”
In a scenario where IoT, BYOD and cloud have become mature and are being warmly welcomed by the enterprises, virtualization has a truly dynamic role to play. It is a technology whose time has now come, as the enterprises are eager to go the virtualized way.
