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 Going Virtual

Aided by new technologies, virtualization is gaining momentum and is expected to become a norm among enterprises    

 CRN Network

Different flavors of virtualization—server, desktop and application are expected to revolutionize computing paradigms in businesses across the country, creating opportunities for channel partners in selling solutions and services. According to Springboard Research, the Asia-Pacific market for virtualization software and services is expected to cross $1.35 billion by 2010. Gartner India says just under 10 percent of servers shipped in India are virtualized.

Growth factors
Lower management costs, better security and faster ROI have been the biggest reasons for a keen interest in virtualization. Server virtualization has seen the biggest interest since ROI offered is more visible and tangible. With spiraling real estate costs in data centers, server virtualization helps customers consolidate applications across range operating systems (OS) on to a single server, cutting down the number of servers and freeing up rack spaces.

Since customers are able to realize faster and tangible ROIs, server virtualization has seen the biggest interests. An additional advantage of server virtualization has been energy savings and over all cooling costs in data centers.

While desktop virtualization does mean additional investments in software licenses as well as infrastructure including new centralized storage, many Indian enterprises have started adopting it to reduce over all management costs and improved security. Desktop virtualization also makes it easier for IT organization to deploy software and reduce deployment and upgrade times. Since the data and application resides in a centralized location, it is also easier to support in case of virus attacks or other malfunctions.

Enterprise customers, especially in the financial sector, have been adopting application virtualization because of its increased security.

Recessionary trends in the economy have been the biggest driver for virtualization because there is pressure on CIOs to explore cost-effective computing options.

Channel Opportunities
Over the last one year, many IT infrastructure vendors like IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and EMC have been working hard to equip their partners to acquire specialization in virtualization solutions. Almost all server vendors have models that come embedded with the basic hypervisor from one of the virtualization vendors and are ready-to-deploy.

Virtualization offers a number of indirect revenues in services and storage, and it is assumed that every dollar invested in virtualization software provides opportunities worth five to seven dollars in services and storage. Since vendors such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft are offering the basic hypervisor free, it makes it relatively cheap for both partners as well as customers to try out virtualization

Intel and AMD have independently developed virtualization extensions to the x86 architecture. Though not directly compatible with each other, they largely serve the same functions. Both will allow a virtual machine hypervisor to run an unmodified guest OS without incurring significant emulation performance penalties.

Future
With more customers looking at consolidation to save costs and ensure security, virtualization deployments are likely to increase. Desktop virtualization could see wider acceptance with Windows 7 launch, as some enterprises are likely to move desktops to a data center. According to industry leaders there are more than 500 pilot projects on desktop virtualization, hence thousands of desktops could be moving to data centers next year.

Solution providers can look forward to additional revenues in services as well as for security and storage, as customers adopt virtualization.