Technology Feature

Virtualization: Next drive for CIOs

Virtualization technology is fast moving into the datacentre and beyond. While the concept has been around for some time, only now is everything coming together for CIOs to realize the true benefits of virtual Infrastructure.

Virtualization has been an industry buzzword for the past few years, though adoption statistics are not rosy. The primary objective of virtualizing infrastructure for any CIO is the belief that this technology simplifies infrastructure and increases the utilization of existing assets involving-among other things-consolidating server resources.

Naveen Mishra, Senior Analyst-Servers of Gartner finds that the market size is very small at this point in time, but the growth in the coming months and years will be rapid. While there is no sequential pattern observed in the adoption of virtualization-no pattern exists for server, storage, desktop, application or other infrastructure virtualization-a close observation shows that it is primarily servers that have caught up and storage virtualization is witnessed in the datacentre environment in the Unix space. However, the emerging trend is x86 server virtualization, which most companies including Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix etc., are driving consciously with their products and solutions. The virtualization scenario is currently purely need-based and is a priority area for CIOs for areas where it proves itself with benefits. For instance, at Gati Ltd., G S Ravi Kumar, CIO has gone in for storage virtualization as a first step. "The reason for opting for storage [virtualization] first was that my data is increasing and there is a need to buy more storage boxes. Hence, if I virtualize,about 12 terabytes of storage into a single box, I can add all my existing primary storage and other storage into that without any additional cost, not having to invest on additional storage," he says.

As per IDC, with the adoption of virtualization technology, utilization rates for x86 systems have jumped from less than 10 percent to a far healthier 30 to 50 percent. Analysts also report that virtualization will rise dramatically through 2010. More than 1.7 million servers will be shipped for virtualization activities, resulting in 7.9 million logical servers. This represents 14.6 percent of all physical servers in 2010, compared with just 4.5 percent of server shipments in 2005.

However, according to Ajay Mittal, Country Head-Servers at IBM India, IT managers are demanding more from their hardware and in addition to memory, high availability features are essential as businesses consolidate their applications on a smaller number of systems .

With regard to the adoption in the country by CIOs, P.T Poonacha, Country Manager, Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) Software, HP India finds that the majority of adoption is on the Unix platform and within the datacentre environment. However, the x86 movement is gaining with the kind of support that virtualization vendors provide and also the packaged solutions that they offer.

Karthik Ramarao, Director-Technologies, Systems Practice, Sun Microsystems India sees virtualization as a panacea for CIOs who are faced with growth challenges, compute power utilization issues and data centre utilization problems. "Currently, datacentres have only 20 percent utilization with seven percent efficiency and some servers don't get used at all. This calls for effective handling where virtualization does the job," he says. Apart from acknowledging the primary advantages of virtualization technology (like improved management capabilities and better IT infrastructure utilization) enterprises in India are fast picking up on its additional benefits like savings in power consumption and optimized investment in physical office space. Souma Das, Country Manager, Citrix India finds application virtualization more pervasive in the CIO space and particularly amongst industry verticals such as railway transport. The concept of Green IT, he believes, is also fuelling growth . "Of the total global market estimate of $9 billion for virtualization including all areas, India constitutes six percent of that. In this country-while application and server virtualization have made their ways-desktop virtualization is being adopted by segments like BPO and ITES, who are looking at saving real estate cost," he explains.

Ganesh Mahabala, Director, VMWare India

Ganesh Mahabala, Director, VMWare India lists five stages in the virtualization process for CIOs to consider. The first being the test and development stage, followed by a demo pilot and proof of concept stage. In the third phase, a few servers are virtualized in a non-critical environment (particularly in legacy systems), aggregation and capacity on demand is measured. Automation and self-managing systems in the datacentre environment is the fourth area, with business continuity, automation of lab and softwares etc. The fifth stage involves liberating and extending virtualization to client computing. With adoption tracing a positive trend, Sunil Gujral, CIO of Quatrro Solutions finds server virtualization to be critical. In Quatrro's case, a proof-of-concept methodology is preferred.

Footprints

Sunil Gujral, CIO of Quatrro Solutions

Virtualization, be it server, storage, applications or desktop, is no longer just a buzzword. Though not well-deployed, it is considered seriously and is not far from implementations in large numbers. Research shows that more than 75 percent of enterprise companies have virtualized or will adopt a virtualization solution in the next 12 months. Currently, the early adopters of virtualization have been BFSI, BPO, ITES, logistics, retail, heathcare and telecom. Government, manufacturing and the up-country market is throwing up opportunity for the use of this technology. Vendors are investing in the right products and resources to drive their technology and make it pervasive amongst the CIO community, showing both tangible and intangible advantages. Microsoft, for instance-as Pallavi Kathuria-Director, Server Business Group-observes, with the objective of making virtualization a reality for customers. The vendor has introduced a third-party virtualization RoI calculation tool to help customers understand the total cost advantage that Microsoft's virtualization solutions deliver.

The security, storage and systems management vendor Symantec is infusing virtualization platforms with core functionality such as storage and server management. Basant Rajan, Chief Technology Officer-India, Symantec Corporation maintains that the solutions help data management in complex, heterogeneous environments, and are able to align with the underlying infrastructure and security needs of the CIO.

Symantec offers solutions that improve the manageability, functionality, and performance of individual virtual server environments, including VMware, XenSource and Solaris Containers & Logical Domains. HP's Poonacha says his company enjoying a 30 percent market share in the infrastructure market place in virtualization and its addressable market is $20 million this year. HP has seen five times growth compared to the previous year. "We will have about 20,000 customers across the virtualization space and 35 percent of them will be on the x86 platform, which is emerging," he says.

Poonacha finds that 70 percent of datacentres use unix and a storage virtualization environment. HP primarily targets BFSI, Telco, ITeS and the infrastructure segment with HP blade systems, Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, Proliant Essentials Virtualization Management software, HP Virtual Server and Storage solutions, services and HP's Opsware virtualization. With its partnership with VMware, it provides virtualization on physical servers.

Citrix has 2400 customers for application virtualization and about 250 customers are added every quarter. As Das observes, "We address banking, finance, telecom, BPO, aviation and the ITeS segment with the XenApp server platform. From a banking point of view, our XenAPP servers are deployed for various core banking applications including CRM, loan banking, HR; and for Telco, billing applications are on virtualized solutions." With its recent acquisition of Xensource, Citrix is driving its Xenserver in the enterprise segment aggressively. Citrix's plays on price-their products cost 10 percent less than the competitors-and relatively low investment required in deploying Citrix solutions. Citrix's 'Provisioning server'-a part of the dynamic delivery centre-also provides interoperability to the datacenter during the virtualization process, with the advantage of easy swapping of physical and logical servers without any cost. Speaking about a large-scale deployment, Das says about 10,000 concurrent licences of its virtualisation server have been deployed for a government organisation.

According to Kathuria, Microsoft will be making broad investments to offer customers a set of virtualization products that will be more dynamic. These investments will span multiple disciplines, ranging from the desktop to the datacenter and will fuel Microsoft's overall virtualization strategy. It's recently launched Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualization, is intended to make virtualization ubiquitous across datacenters.

IBM's Mittal clearly sees penetration in the server space where CIOs are downsizing servers from 100 to 20 or less in the infrastructure space, mostly in the industrial sector, with the x86 market showing positive signs. ITES companies have tested desktop virtualization and as V Balakrishnan, CIO, Polaris Software Ltd, who has deployed several solutions for virtualizing its various application, observes, "VMware servers are deployed in critical production roles, as is Citrix, as well as a new software solution 'Appstrem', that streamlines software on-demand and removes it after use." "We have virtualized servers, desktops and storage as a sequence. While all the infrastructure servers are virtualized, some expensive software tools shared by several members by turn are done as well as some utility software used casually are also virtualized", adds Balakrishnan. According to him, while infrastructure servers affect everyone of 500 offshore associates, other servers impact 50 to 500 user communities.
The virtualization vendor who is said to enjoy over 80 percent market share in this space-VMWare-has offerings on servers, storage, desktops and applications and has about 350 customers who have been early adopters. According to Mahabala, BPO, financial services and ITeS have been predominantly using VDI solutions for desktop virtualization. "We have seen 30 percent growth and almost doubled our revenues this year," he says.
The same is the case with Sun Microsystems as Ramarao maintains that about 99 per cent of its customers from banking and telecom are on virtualized environments. "We see more deployments on storage too in SAN environments," he adds.

Gati's Ravi Kumar has virtualized 12 Tb of data in a SAN environment using Sun's products. "Earlier, I had to have one box to store 1 Terabyte and it was not possible to expand. But now, all the data gets into one box where space is also saved, besides other benefits. I am not worried about the acquisition cost, which was not very high and my upgrade cost on the hardware and additional storage boxes would probably be equivalent or more than the virtualization cost," says Kumar and adds, "My investment is protected and my old storage is utilized to the fullest extent with this technology."

Kumar, however, is not contemplating virtualizing servers for its GEM (Gati Enterprise Management) solution, which includes the main production environment.

After creating a thorough proof-of-concept, doing trials and experiments, Quattrro's Gujral is now deploying VMWare solutions to virtualize the server environment. Gujral remarks, "We will virtualize 30 servers performing as the critical backend system. During the PoC we tried virtualizing 8 servers which was brought down to 1 server and saw the savings." The objective behind Gujral's move is to have cent percent utilization on CPU resources, which is currently at 12 percent. "We have to invest in storage architecture, but with the 30 servers I intend to move down to 4 servers in a SAN environment, we expect to see about 50 percent capex savings," he says and adds "I am also saving about 70 percent cost on hardware, besides having additional space to run my DR solutions in a virtual environment."

With CIOs gradually taking steps to virtualize their environments, there are also certain challenges preventing this technology from becoming more ubiquitous.

CIO Challenges

"The primary challenge for CIOs is the to impress the benefits upon CFOs and providing the sufficient internal education needed," opines Gujral. Gati's Ravi Kumar finds that this is a practical tool where the benefits needs to be completely shown to the management before the final investment is approved.

Sun's Ramarao points out that awareness is low about virtualization, which allows the same machine to be used to run varied applications. Moreso, he believes, is the problem of the fear factor-whether things will work without actual, physical hardware.

Mittal opines that since it is still confined primarily to the unix environment, virtualization as a phenomenon is considred to be an expensive play.
The critical challenge that VMWare's Mahabala faces is that the process of signing up SLAs on these projects becomes a difficult proposition for customer-facing companies. HP's Poonacha maintains that if there is insufficient justification to virtualize and if there is no clear road map for the organization, the acquisition cost could pose a challenge. "The CIO needs to clear as to which of the top 10 applications he intends to migrate to virtualized environment," remarks Poonacha.

"Ignorance is one of the discouraging factors for CIOs who are not looking at datacenter utilization and specific product utilization", says Das.
While challenges are inherent, there are certain enriching factors and innovations in this technology which are fuelling growth. The benefits that this brings in could be an eye opener for CIOs looking to take to this at a quicker pace.

Enriching Factors

Points out that the key factors to determine the market scenario in the next few years will be applications dependency which will drive virtualization. "Software vendors would decipher and develop virtualization solutions and good technical support will be a crucial aspect driving this," says Kathuria. Most vendors and some CIOs do agree that virtualization would see benefits in terms of reduced TCO, power and physical space requirement reduction, accelerated server provisioning, consolidation, increased availability in terms of storage for simplified backup and recovery, business continuity built-into-model and dynamic provisioning. Another benefit Microsoft sees is transformation of physical IT infrastructure into logical layers with policy-based management that enables self-managing, dynamic systems.

Another trend which would interest CIOs, as Das maintains, is that IT services companies such as Infosys, CSC, IBM, Wipro, Accenture etc., are partnering with virtualization product companies and conducting pilot studies in their labs before extending the technology to their customers, which then becomes a proven model.

"There are several automation tools available to track your product lifecycle, which will also help in deploying virtual machines and in helping the applications to be used to the fullest extent," says Poonacha.

Gartner's Mishra points that a good investment on service and support infrastructure by the vendors would drive virtualization. Gujral finds aspects like avoiding newer investment on infrastructure, besides effectively using existing infrastructure, would instigate CIOs to resort to virtualization. The opinion is shared by Ravi Kumar, who says that capacity to address data growth will drive thought towards virtualization, which is now very application-specific.

Polaris' Balakrishnan, who has virtualized all environments, finds it to be very cost effective with savings on hardware, space, AMC, power, maintenance and DR, besides being easy to maintain, allowing faster creation and change management. The shared use of expensive software-the ability to use node-locked licenses in shared mode, like floating licenses-and cost of operation significantly lower than on non-virtualized environment are all key factors working in favour of virtualization, he believes. Mahabala maintains that CIOs could see reduction in TCO within six to eight months of implementation.

Obviously, given the challenges and aspirations, technology innovators are keen on having a clear road map and have quite a task helping the CIOs in taking quicker decisions to adopt virtualization.

Way Forward

The current trend is that out of every ten CIOs, about six have plans to go in for virtualization and find it a strong emerging technology. Some of them are at the testing and evaluation stage and some have zeroed-in on a vendor after cost and profit ratio analysis.
Balakrishan does believe that virtualization is evolving as the standard deployment method for servers and there are several software tools and utilities available, which will continue to strengthen.

For Mittal, more than growth, it is expertise that will determine the adoption level and hence believes in making it available to larger users at a reasonable cost. "We encourage our customers to make smaller investment and virtualize in a phased manner," he avers.

Ramarao believes in making a virtualization fabric available for all products with comprehensive packages for servers, software, networking and storage to make it more ubiquitous.

VMWare's Mahabala is strengthening OEM relationships to drive virtualization as part of their offerings across verticals, while making its ESXi products free to download by the customers.

Ravi Kumar will be rolling out this process on the server environment, covering all applications in the year, including workflow, mail servers, monitoring servers and so on. "We would also gradually virtualize non-production environment such as HR, and other utilities to derive optimum benefits," he says.

Mahindra & Mahindra is yet another manufacturing company which has virtualized its entire server environment and intends to extend it to the other applications. According to Das, with the concept of Green IT caching up, the virtualization application delivery model is becoming pervasive. Web applications, load balancing, integration of various technologies including SSL VPN, is driving virtualization rapidly. HP will also see 30 percent increase in touch points with its virtualized solutions and see expansion with newer customers, besides 40 percent growth coming from the existing customers.

Promotional activities, increased investment on educating end-users, focused, industry-specific technology seminars are on the top of every vendor's agenda.