CONTENTS

Simplification, virtually!

As the virtualization market rolls onto the growth track, Mehak Chawla evaluates the trends, the challenges and the road to simplification that virtualization vendors are treading rapidly

Talk about virtualization and any analyst will tell you that it is one of the technologies with the highest growth potential in India. The statement has remained more or less the same during much of the past decade. The interesting bit to note, however, is that the numbers tell quite a different story.

When it comes to virtualization, the numbers in India are dismal to say the least. Although virtualization has been enjoying a good growth, that has been lingering between 30-35%, it is on a relatively small base. The reasons for this low adoption, experts said, were multi-layered. The slowdown, of course, had a major part to play here. Since CAPEX was put on hold across the board, technologies involving high spending like virtualization saw slow adoption.

Moreover, virtualization as a technology remains in the experimental stages in India. Although it has been around for a while, the market for virtualization has not really matured here. This has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of virtualization projects went wrong in the initial stages, primarily because of the lack of awareness. As a result, there is still a lot of skepticism about the benefits and RoI that virtualization can yield.

“Despite the awareness of the superior value over traditional computing, the initial cost involved is the key concern when it comes to adopting virtualization. Organizations will also have to address some internal issues such as the procurement of appropriate hardware, creating a shared resource and identifying suitable personnel to manage the virtualized system and also a growing demand for software that manages the virtualized systems,” commented K. Chockalingam, Enterprise Solutions Architect, Quest Software.

A significant factor hindering this technology's growth is that it has failed to seep into the medium business space, forget about the small enterprises. The reason again is cost. With time, maturity and adoption, there was a general expectation that economies of scale would gradually reach the virtualization market and that this would result in more SMBs adopting it. That, however, did not happen. Over the years, virtualization only became more sophisticated, more complex and, hence, costlier.

The silver lining though is that virtualization seems to be finally transiting from the hype cycle to the adoption cycle. The past year saw many organizations moving their virtualization projects beyond the pilot stages and scaling them up. What's more, it has even started living up to the vendor's claims. With awareness on the rise and several vendors offering competitive solutions, virtualization is translating into tangible benefits today.

Beyond the server

Virtualization is moving beyond the server level. While the numbers are not too rosy on the storage or desktop front, things are looking up. Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, Symantec, commented, “There is mass adoption on the server side for large enterprises, storage virtualization is still at a nascent stage and end-point virtualization is in the experimental stages.”

The paradigm shift that was expected to happen for virtualization as a whole, has finally occurred for server virtualization. According to Nemertes Research, approximately 38% of IT workloads were virtualized today and customers were no longer dealing with static workloads. In 2010, server virtualization was the form of virtualization that took off in a big way. That was indeed the space that saw a lot of innovation and activity. The Cloud also did a massive amount of good to server virtualization, but that' s a different story.

"Data centers are looking at the next step, the next technology and that is where server virtualization comes in." Vikas Desai Lead Technology Consultant, RSA

The factor to be credited with this coming of server virtualization would be the final establishment of the concrete RoI that users can achieve by virtualizing their servers. No wonder then, server virtualization has become the first step for any organization seeking to traverse the virtualization pathway. Vikas Desai, Lead Technology Consultant, RSA, said, “The fact is that most data centers or organizations have reached the stage where they have achieved the maximum savings with hardware. Now they are looking at the next step, the next technology and that is where server virtualization comes in.”

The explosive growth in data and therefore in servers has been the other push that server virtualization received. Over the years, every organization felt the need to increase its server utilization and virtualization was an obvious answer. Besides all this, there was also the fact that server virtualization is a tried and tested thing. At its basic level it helps maximize server hardware utilization, decrease physical server footprint and drive up efficiencies.

The tried and tested mantra doesn't quite hold true when it comes to storage. Though storage virtualization has also been around for some time, it failed to register an impressive growth despite its promised benefits. Hence, it is still touted to be at a nascent stage in the Indian market. Even in the organizations that have deployed virtualization for their storage, the percentage of storage capacity virtualized is in single digits. A big problem with storage is that most enterprises went in for either NAS or SAN a few years back and that is making virtualization complex. Unless they create a platform that is hardware or topology independent, virtualization becomes challenging to implement.

The story is hardly different when it comes to end-user or desktop virtualization. There is however, one crucial differentiator here, which is that interest in desktop virtualization is rapidly growing. End-user virtualization is being touted as the biggest opportunity in the virtualization space in the APAC region. This despite the fact, that most organizations rank desktop virtualization low on their priority list.

“To reap the full benefits of virtualization, adopting server virtualization should constitute the significant part of an organization’s strategy. This step offers the maximum value add and builds a strong foundation for the desktop virtualization to follow,” said Chockalingam.

He stated that the complexity of managing the IT applications increased with the number of users in any organization and hence it became the prime motive in adopting desktop virtualization. Even as Manageability was the key motivating factor to implement desktop virtualization, other secondary benefits also influenced the decision including data security and consolidation, easier upgradation and least impact of newer software releases, efficient and optimized allocation of processing and storage resources among various users and the fact that the thin client used had a longer shelf life.

The hurdles

There is no denying the claim that virtualization, if implemented properly, can deliver measurable results. Nevertheless, the management challenges that come with virtualization cannot be ignored either. Complexity in management along with considerable management overheads are a common scenario when virtualized software from multiple vendors gets implemented. Besides, being labor intensive, a virtual environment requires a faster response time which is required for any type of incident management. Add to all this lack of awareness and less than complete trust in virtualization technology and you find companies are going slow on this front. Data storage and server virtualization levels are not matching, leading to not so friendly technology.

Moreover, the initial cost is relatively high for SMBs and hence the reluctance to shift to a virtualized environment. Elaborated Raj Bala, Chief Technology Officer, Cognizant, “There are two key hindrances to the widespread adoption of virtualization. The first hindrance is the inability to fully leverage virtualization technology due to the lack of in-depth technical expertise in using and deploying advanced features. An example would be that of load balancing virtual machines and optimizing the data center footprint from the storage and compute perspective. Another would be one-to-one mapping between physical and virtual servers. The second hindrance is that of cost. Today, server virtualization products are expensive and hence their adoption is slow in India.”

"The lack of in-depth technical expertise in using and deploying advanced features is a hindrance to adoption." Raj Bala Chief Technology Officer, Cognizant

Still, there is hope on the cost front. As competition among virtualization vendors heats up, prices for server virtualization products would fall leading to the increased adoption of virtualization in the Indian market. “In the near future, vendors would charge a nominal fee for the hypervisor and make their money charging users based on how many applications are virtualized,” rationalized Bala.

As of now, there is indeed a lot of misconception that virtualization will solve all problems. It helps maximize server hardware utilization, decrease physical server footprint and drive up efficiencies—that's its real function. The hype comes from the fact that, once deployed, it will solve all problems related to performance and scalability. This is where organizations need to understand the what and why of virtualization, rather than deploying it to solve any kind of data center problem. One of the biggest challenges that organizations have today is managing virtual machines from various vendors and their interoperability. “One cannot migrate an application live from hypervisor A to hypervisor B. This has been one of the biggest challenges for organizations having a hybrid class of hypervisors from multiple vendors for historic reasons,” explained Bala.

Most often, virtualization is viewed as magic dust that can solve all problems and that's why there is this misconception around its usage and benefits. One needs to understand how to drive up server utilization by using techniques such as virtual machine compaction, understanding user workloads and so on. Virtualizing hardware and server utilization from the storage and compute perspective are two different things that need to be understood in their entirety.

"Traditional DC organizational structure and management models are barriers to realizing the benefits of virtualization." Sumit Mukhija National Sales Manager - Data Center, Cisco India & SAARC

Sumit Mukhija, National Sales Manager - Data Center, Cisco India & SAARC, added, “As IT professionals implement data center virtualization projects, many are finding that the traditional data center organizational structure and management models are barriers to realizing the benefits of virtualization.”

According to a recent report by CIO Research, 42% of CIOs cited organizational and IT service management challenges as the major barriers to the broad adoption of data center virtualization technologies. These challenges exist in the areas of organizational models, people and skills, management processes, tools, governance and metrics. To fully realize the benefits of data center virtualization IT organizations need to modernize their infrastructure management models and shift from the traditional silo focus to a services-oriented lifecycle model.

Owing to these challenges, customers are still virtualizing a small percentage of their data centers due to factors such as high price, less than bare-metal performance, security concerns, management hurdles and issues in transitioning application. The majority of the users refrain from virtualizing their mission-critical set-up.

Pavan Reddy Bayyapu, Senior Director IMS, Intelligroup, an NTT DATA company, highlighted the labor costs of virtualization saying, “Virtualization adds complexity, which increases the costs associated with management primarily because we rely on people and there are only a few available with the necessary technical expertise.” Naik pointed out another problem that, “When you enter into a virtualized environment your disaster recovery process becomes complex because you have no dedicated hardware.”

With so many complexities that go hand in hand with virtualization and the apparent lack of awareness coupled with it, it doesn't come as a surprise that Indian CIOs are still shying away from allocating part of their precious (and often scanty) budgets to virtualization.

2010 trends

There were two dominant trends when it came to virtualization in 2010. The first was that vendors recognized the management challenges attached to virtualization and came up with some sort of middleware to handle the same. Bala observed, “The server virtualization market is moving towards the use of paid hypervisors, where the real benefit comes from tools to manage virtualized infrastructure, for example, VMware’s DRS among others.” Players like Symantec are actively chasing the market with such solutions and others like Red Hat are trying to solve the same issue through open source platforms.

Lack of technical expertise to handle the management complexity, which came along with the adoption was another major issue. Vendors like VMware have products like the vCenter that simplify the virtualization management and help do away with the complexities.

"With open source solutions, SMBs can look at a highly scalable and flexible framework, at a cost that is half of what their propriety counterparts have to offer." Andy Karandikar Head Marketing, Red Hat India

“Cost is one of the primary reasons for the low deployment of this technology amongst SMBs. They have limited funds allocated to IT and, therefore, CIOs face the dilemma of how to drive growth on a budget. With open source solutions, SMBs can look at a highly scalable and flexible framework, at a cost that is half of what their propriety counterparts have to offer,” said Andy Karandikar, Head Marketing, Red Hat India.

Red Hat already has a list of customers in India spanning large to small enterprises. Some of them are Euronet Services Pvt Ltd, Bilcare Research, Carnation Auto, Etisalat, Growing Opportunity Finance India Pvt Ltd etc.

The market as a whole is heading for a single management framework. Such products saw high traction in the previous year as they promised to solve some of the painful management woes associated with virtualization. However, will these software applications actually ease manageability issues or just add another layer to manage at an additional cost is a question that is yet to be answered.

The second trend that caught up within server virtualization was that the application layer and its high availability got a lot of attention and emerged as a big area.

The adoption of platform neutral technologies seems like another big trend. There is no vendor that is not insisting that its focus is on platform agnostic techniques of virtualization and customers are also asking specifically for technology that will sync in with their legacy infrastructure.

The adoption of this technology has increased over the past year, aided by hardware advancements and increased awareness of its benefits. New challenges while deploying and using virtualization are expected to create opportunities for product companies as well as for IT service providers.

On Cloud 9

What years of experimentation and active marketing could not do, a new technology has. We are talking about the same technology that has got everyone excited namely the Cloud. Cloud computing has put the spotlight squarely on virtualization as it happens to be the underlying technology, the bed rock for the Cloud. According to Naik, “A hybrid of in-house and private Cloud deployments are going to help the cause of virtualization in a big way.”

In a survey conducted by VMware, China and India led the APAC region with their Cloud adoption plans with a majority of organizations ready for the smooth transformation and implementation of Cloud computing solutions. 60% of the organizations were either planning or had implemented, Cloud computing solutions. The greatest adoption was likely from the IT/ITES, manufacturing and infrastructure sectors.

"The technology is at a nascent stage in India and has started seeing adoption and it is a key requirement for our partners to win the customer's confidence." Seema Ambastha Director-Technology, VMware India

“We are focusing on enabling the virtualization to Cloud journey since the Cloud is a natural extension of virtualization. The technology is at a nascent stage in India and has started seeing adoption, so we think it is a key requirement for our partner to win the customer's confidence. Virtualization is revolutionizing the IT industry, radically improving every dimension from the desktop through the data center and to the Cloud. A prominent trend that will be noticed this year is that this niche technology is turning more into a mass one, with it being adopted not just by the big business houses but also by SMBs,” said Seema Ambastha, Director-Technology, VMware India.

With the advent of the Cloud, there is also this hope that virtualization will finally percolate down to the medium businesses. The hosted services are expected to gain favor with Indian SMBs that have shown a great inclination towards OPEX.

No wonder then that every SI or service provider worth its salt has ventured aggressively into the Cloud domain. That is also why the Cloud, apparently, is getting a lot of attention from virtualization biggies in both the storage and the server space.

However, the Cloud is expected to take quite some time in settling down in the Indian market, so the hopes of a jump in virtualization numbers riding on the back of the Cloud would have to be a long term aspiration.

Midhun Chandra, Sr. Architect, Cloud Competency, Persistent Systems, said, “Virtualization is the underlying technology and the driving force behind Cloud offerings. Although Cloud computing will continue to create a buzz, we do not expect widespread adoption in 2011. Small organizations will start using the public Cloud for reasons of cost and flexibility. However, issues of data security and SLA performance will hold enterprises from moving to public Cloud infrastructure for some time.”

“Cloud computing will bring about consolidation, optimization and abstraction at the infrastructure layer. The earlier concerns of security in the Cloud are also slowly changing with products like vShield from VMware,” added Ambastha.

The road ahead

The outlook for virtualization in 2011 rests on two driving forces. The first is the Cloud and the second is the issue of security in a virtualized environment. “With India moving through the different stages of Cloud computing (especially Infrastructure-as-a-Service) virtualization, which is the underlying infrastructure of the Cloud, will make some headway enabling the delivery of operationally optimized and agile solutions,” observed Ekta Aggarwal, Program Manager, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East.

The other buzz is on the security front—both in the Cloud and in the virtualized domain. “Authenticating Cloud services is already big business for us and most service providers are understanding that security is critical in a virtualized environment as well. They are bundling it with their solutions,” said Desai.

Application virtualization is another area that is gaining a foothold in the data center. With Cloud computing catching on, IT-as-a-Service is going mainstream. The ability to centrally manage desktop infrastructure and meet compliance and security requirements is driving the adoption of desktop virtualization solutions. Although end point virtualization is yet to move beyond the planning and experimentation stage, a lot of vendors and analysts are pitching it as the next big wave in virtualization.

On the whole, Indian CIOs are still treading cautiously on the road to virtualization but the caution seems to be turning into optimism, gradually, but decisively.

mehak.chawla@expressindia.com