Virtualization 2.0

Virtualization 2.0: the great transformer

The next wave in virtualization will focus on continuity, DR and high availability resulting in significant profitability says Priyanka Akhouri

Organizations today are looking for technologies that reduce costs, increase productivity, security and enhance the disaster recovery process. Most CIOs believe that virtualization is one such technology, which can bring about a major transformation and solve most of their problems.

At a business level, solutions pertaining to application and service availability despite planned or unplanned outages are becoming a requirement. Virtualization 2.0 is one such technology that is gaining momentum. So what exactly is ‘Virtualization 2.0’?

Most CIOs are of the opinion that virtualization 2.0 is nothing but in many ways just a natural extension of virtualization 1.0, where the focus is more on utilization and optimization. Subram Natarajan, Solutions Architect, STG, IBM Asia Pacific, said, “Virtualization 2.0 will be the next wave of the infrastructure paradigm. Essentially, this is supposed to bring focus to the business continuity aspects of an enterprise. Servers, storage and network elements will start featuring in a more robust manner with ‘no single point of failure’ characteristics.”

Virtualization 2.0 is real

Virtualization essentially focuses on areas of improved utilization, better manageability, reduced carbon footprint, greener IT and data center optimization, and reduced power consumption. According to Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President, Solutions and Products Group (APAC), Hitachi Data Systems, Virtualization 1.0 focused on server consolidation, resource sharing and storage consolidation, whereas virtualization 2.0 focuses around non-disruptive mobility of data and applications, dynamic provisioning, balancing workloads and the like. Therefore, Virtualization 2.0 is about taking the virtualization from development, staging and production servers to the desktop by means of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), mobile and disaster recovery applications.

As globally integrated enterprises evolve, the Virtualization 2.0 platform attempts to provide benefits in the area of improved security, availability and open standards. According to Gartner analysts, Virtualization 2.0 is one of the top 10 technologies that IT companies will deploy in 2009.

Fundamentally, Virtualization 2.0 changes the way people think about virtualization. Users feel that virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization, increasing the flexibility needed to adapt to the changing requirements and workloads. “Businesses can achieve 24x7 availability, without compromising on other desired characteristics such as optimization, better utilization of assets, [beefed up] security, and enhanced management. The advent of Virtualization 2.0 indicates the maturity and acceptance of this technology in the mainstream of IT,” commented Natarajan.

Focus on DR/BC

In a virtualized environment, there is a genuine opportunity to reduce inter-device communication by leveraging the co-existence of various virtual servers on the same physical host. Going forward, this technology will continue to evolve in the areas of network security, provisioning and service levels. “Enterprises need a solution to cost-effectively recover from data loss, corruption and full site outages whilst satisfying regulatory compliance requirements. To meet these needs you need a backup and recovery solution that uses cost-optimized disk (e.g. a de-duplication product) and tape for archiving and long-term disaster recovery—but backing up and recovering from virtual servers is very different than from [doing so with] physical servers,” said Jim Simon, Director of Marketing, APAC, Quantum.

“From a long-term perspective, it will help customers align their infrastructures to their business objectives better, through innovative technologies such storage controller virtualization, dynamic tiered storage, dynamic provisioning, gaining control and governance over their unstructured data environments,” added Venugopal.

Increasing presence and relevance

Today’s competitive business scenario requires that IT infrastructure solutions provide three essential traits that Virtualization 2.0 addresses. The three characteristics that are the key differentiators include:

• Cost reduction: A technology that is not only about cost savings, but is also a technology platform that provides a dramatic cost advantage to a business.
• Speed: This refers to the ability with which a business can respond to changing user demand.
• Integration: IT decisions and operations have aligned with business. It requires building real time business analytics into IT, building accuracy and relevance in all business decisions.

Virtualization 2.0 aims to address the above concerns along with issues such as improvements in business continuity. With its increasing presence in the businesses, CIOs no longer need to worry about planned or unplanned outages and the impact of the same upon their business. Virtualization 2.0 allows moving to virtual environments across different hardware platforms without causing outages. Essentially these features help IT departments align service levels tightly with that of a business.

Innovation, agility and efficiency are imperative to succeed in a tough economic environment. Industry experts believe that advances in virtualization accelerate all these possibilities by providing innovative deployment features, quick provisioning and the optimal use of resources. Simon opines that with IT budgets being tight, usage of Virtualization 2.0 technologies would helps IT organizations maximize their investments, thereby saving money. He added, “Most virtualization packages include some form of high availability add-on that allows virtual machines to move between physical resources. However, just like in a physical server environment, high availability is only one portion of a data protection strategy. Industry analysts estimate that over 50% of organizations are using server virtualization for some portion of their operations.

Trends and significance

Virtualization 2.0 principles apply to storage as well. “Storage virtualization is superior to traditional storage solutions. As the cost of manpower is increasing day-by-day, CIOs have no option but to invest in the automation of storage processes,” said Simon. The adoption rate of storage virtualization has been lagging behind that of server virtualization. Growing management complexity, exponential data growth, storage management, low utilization of storage assets, decreasing budgets for IT staff and resources and achieving cost-effective business continuity and data protection are the most common storage issues addressed by today’s CIO. Storage virtualization being a larger part of the storage industry’s trends and innovations offers seamless, non-disruptive data migration from any-to-any heterogeneous storage.

Venugopal believes that Virtualization 2.0 technology can lead to a reduction in the need for redundant software applications and licenses. “If you deploy virtualization, it requires fewer systems—requiring less floor space, less power and cooling, which in turn reduces the number and cost of future acquisitions (fewer overall storage systems to manage) and reduces the labor costs of managing storage infrastructure as well. This allows legacy storage to go off-lease and fulfill asset depreciation schedules, yet it is still be utilized in the virtual pool. Data safeguards maintain virtual access to data in case of system failure,” he added.

According to Bhaskar Sayyaparaju, CTO, Sify Technologies, the benefits associated, such as better storage capacity utilization, availability and manageability will help storage virtualization to become the de-facto IT platform in the near future. “Moreover, there is a lot of emphasis on hardware assistance and management tools. In case of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the virtual machines of users that are not logged on remain dormant,” he added. Mobile devices thrive on virtualization due to the falling cost of flash storage and ease of application downloads due to better connectivity. In disaster recovery scenarios, storage network based replication allows virtualization to create easy recovery options.

“Desktop virtualization has many drivers in the Indian context. It offers a way to extend the benefits of virtualization—better performance, lower TCO, higher security and greater flexibility to the entire desktop,” said Souma Das, Area Vice President, Citrix India. Unlike client-server computing, desktop virtualization provides access to a complete operating environment, including the operating system tools, applications, and data. Server-based desktop virtualization removes the dependency on specific local PC configurations.

Business interest in virtualization 2.0

Natarajan is of the view that Virtualization 2.0 is here to stay. “I completely believe that Virtualization 2.0 is a hot topic in every IT company today. The benefits that customers and enterprises have seen, so far is compelling and real. The momentum of adoption is high and vendors are responding to the industry requirements by making significant progress in their offerings.” He asserted that the reason for the sustained interest levels is because Virtualization 2.0 tends to address various pressing challenges of a CIO—all in one go. Cost reduction and improved utilization challenges have been on the radar of every organization. Yet with newer challenges in the area of energy efficiency and green IT, security and high availability, the operational difficulties enlarge. Virtualization 2.0 is a technology that has the ability to address these challenges with tangible results.

According to Sayyaparaju virtualization technologies have evolved to utilize commodity, off-the-shelf hardware and relatively inexpensive iSCSI-based storage hardware to realize cheaper disaster recovery and business continuity rollouts. “High availability of services is made affordable by supporting virtualization technologies, for implementing server clustering and appliance computing,” he added.

Virtual servers have being used primarily for consolidating underutilized physical servers to improve on power, cooling, floor-space, environmental issues along with simplifying management and reducing cost. “Going forward the focus of server virtualization will shift from resource consolidation to the enablement of dynamic virtual data centers, supporting ongoing maintenance of physical resources to support applications requiring more processing power than is available in a single server,” said Simon.

Virtualization is instrumental in reducing the CAPEX, TCO, and extends the life of legacy assets, successfully meeting the predefined QoS parameters on a per application basis. It also helps heterogeneous, any-to-any replication using one set of tools and a common process.

Early adopters

Many are of the view that this technology is sector agnostic. “Historically, we have seen tremendous growth in the adoption rate of technology by the telecom industry on a much larger scale. This is because of the cost advantages,” commented Natarajan.

Moreover, the BFSI, government, media and the software verticals would see higher adoption of Virtualization 2.0 in 2009. “It impacts data management methods and operations, and requires companies to demonstrate that the necessary people, procedures, and infrastructure are in place to ensure compliance,” commented Simon. Manufacturing, healthcare and logistics are easy targets for early virtual desktop implementations. The insurance segment will continue to reap the benefits of virtualization in disaster recovery initiatives. For IT/ITES companies, since time to market is critical the virtualization technology helps a lot, supporting quick deployment.

Final verdict

Many industry experts feel that there are certain constraints to this technology. “Virtualization solutions offered by various vendors still do not work well with each other, meaning, most virtualization technologies are still proprietary. End users may not wish to be ‘locked-in’ to one vendor and this is one of the biggest objections from end-users. Another aspect, especially for developing countries where labor and floor space costs are not high, is that it is much harder to justify such solutions where the ROI [may not be as convincing as it is in the developed world],” added Simon. There is no entry barrier to using this technology. Most issues arise out of poor understanding of the technology.

In these times of economic uncertainty, the reality is that IT budgets would continued to be scrutinized, even though data continues to grow rapidly and expectations on service levels continue to increase on IT. With the unique capabilities of Virtualization 2.0 customers can ‘do more with less’, coping with the rapidly changing landscape.

priyanka.akhouri@expressindia.com