Making inroads into India Inc

Today, virtualization is not merely heard as a buzzword in the market; it is seen as one of those platforms that are trying to address the entire IT infrastructure requirement under one umbrella, and it has definitely helped IT management teams to better manage their infrastructure.
One of the key benefits of virtualization is IT infrastructure management and it also holds the promise of business transformation. For any organization today, the directive from the management is 'to do more with less' or 'to do more with what you have'. Virtualization fits the best into both these directives, as organizations can achieve more with less or optimize existing infrastructure using virtualization solutions. It enables organizations to consolidate and get more from existing or new servers, save more power, ensure high availability and business continuity at much lower costs besides helping organizations save more on operational expenses. It is following its maturity lifecycle and, the trend now is more towards using virtualization as a natural and seamless extension of the existing IT infrastructure. This has resulted in organizations adopting more of standards and policy-based service delivery methods, which would ensure that services are delivered seamlessly irrespective of the delivery platform and are being done without compromising on compliance and security needs. According to Sumit Mukhija, National Sales Manager-Datacenter, Cisco India and SAARC, virtualization offers a refreshed business model to service providers for outsourcing customer applications and locating these applications within their regionally managed datacenters with well-defined and secured partitions. And for enterprises, virtualization offers datacenter consolidation and reduced power and cooling costs and often defers the need for additional datacenter sites. “Efficiency is the reason why companies are starting to take a hard look at virtualization and dynamic provisioning and trying to achieve much more with what they already have. Now in a climate of cautious spending and doing more with less, many are turning to virtualization and dynamic provisioning to unlock unused storage resources and improve overall utilization,” said Srikant Chakrapani, Director for Channels-India, Hitachi Data Systems.

Traction in India
Virtualization has emerged as one of the most critical IT concepts in the global as well as Indian context. According to IDC, virtualization will rise dramatically by the year 2011. Today, most of the CIOs want to deploy virtualization solutions to address issues like low system capacity utilization, poor performance and other challenges associated with managing growing IT infrastructure. It is also being touted that virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations in India. Although, the overall market for cloud in India is still nascent, the technology is emerging as one of the major trends. VMware's solutions for virtualized solutions are seeing great traction in the market. With controlled capital expenditure being witnessed across the board and virtualization solutions becoming increasingly affordable, the technology is set to become mainstream in the country. “Virtualization is a technology that benefits anyone from IT professionals to commercial businesses and government organizations. There are millions of people around the world today who use virtualization to save time, money and energy while achieving more with the computer hardware they already own,” said Ganesan Arumugam, Director-Partners, VMware India. “Companies have rapidly adopted virtualization over the past few years, but there are big differences in their use of the technology. Most companies are able to reduce server hardware spending, real estate savings, improve disaster recovery and achieve high availability,” he asserted.

According to Kishor Wikhe, Senior VP-Enterprise Technology, Symphony Services, the year 2010 witnessed wider adoption of virtualization as the economies recovered. SMBs also adopted virtualization as the solution cost plummets due to increased competition. Besides pricing, a strong attraction for SMBs to move to virtualization is disaster recovery. Using virtualization, disaster recovery, which otherwise has been prohibitively expensive using physical infrastructure, became suddenly affordable. Enterprises are now gaining confidence in virtualization technology and adopting this platform for hosting business critical applications (mail servers, ERP, home-grown customer applications). Overall, the market will see a lot of enterprises moving from their current evaluation and test status to serious production implementations. “Over the years, we have seen an increase in the levels of adoption of virtualization technology by Indian enterprises as they have, slowly but steadily, begun to understand the overall RoI of this technology. Virtualization has been successfully deployed in the Indian enterprises today, because it delivers real benefits that drive business value,” added Subram Natarajan, Executive IT Consultant-Systems and Technology Group, IBM. On the other hand, Sanchit Vir Gogia, Associate Research Manager, Springboard Research said that the Indian market is still in the nascent stages of adoption of virtualization as a platform. Though there is some traction from the large enterprises, the visibility is still missing in the SMB space. The market is still testing and understanding the concept. The Indian market is yet to witness enterprise-wide deployment of virtualization technologies.

Here, we can say that the demand for virtualization in India has been consistently increasing and is in line with previous market forecasts. The adoption has definitely increased after the recent economic climate, and we expect people to look at using virtualization in the regular production environment.

Reasons behind wide scale adoption
Virtualization has revolutionized the IT industry, radically improving every dimension from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, and virtualization platforms have gained the support of the entire ecosystem of technologies ie from servers to storage to networking to security to management to operating systems to applications.
The paucity of power and space is the main driver for the widespread adoption of virtualization in India. Increasingly, virtual servers are being used in the IT space to reduce power consumption as well as optimize IT resources. Besides, it increases efficiency, decreases hardware costs, reduces capital expenditure, allocates resources in a flexible way, leads to effective workload management, reduces footprint of servers, and saves on
real estate space for any organization. It can also lead to cost management along with virtual infrastructure management. Besides, it also increases control over IT resources and there is better use of hardware available as well. And as organizations plan for future infrastructure requirements, they are increasingly looking at virtualization as one of the cornerstone technologies.
Satyaki Maitra, Director-SI Business, NetApp India, pointed out, “Virtualization technologies can significantly reduce the storage required for production, backup, and DR with server virtualization, which is a significant reason why they are so popular these days. NetApp provides storage virtualization technologies which can significantly reduce the storage required for production, backup, and DR with server virtualization. NetApp ensures the savings found with server virtualization can be actualized and even enhanced with our storage virtualization technologies.” Virtualization also offers a rapid RoI through decreased management costs and increased asset utilization. Organizations can enhance system availability and help lower cost and complexity of disaster recovery solutions by virtualizing resources for a flexible, dynamic infrastructure. It also provides a resilient foundation and shared infrastructure that enables better access to infrastructure and information in support of business applications and services-oriented architecture.
Adding further, Naresh Shah, MD, Novell IDC and VP, Global Engineering Strategy, stated that the rising cost of owning and operationalizing an IT infrastructure is what is making a case in point for virtualization. Unlike the US and Europe, where the rising cost of human resources is driving virtualization, here it is the rising cost of hardware, energy, real estate-all of which are necessary for expanding a datacenter.
The IT industry is moving towards the vision of cloud computing, and virtualization is the infrastructure on which it is being built. Each stage of virtualization adoption is making the next stage possible and builds cumulatively on the previous stages. Moving through the stages of virtualization, organisations are gaining the benefits of each stage while at the same time building the infrastructure that will support cloud computing. “Virtualization changes the way we view resources in the datacenter. The mapping from physical to virtual is complicated and more importantly, the virtual machines move around to balance performance. Virtualization improves utilization, makes IT management easier and flexible, however, it adds a layer of abstraction and complexity to IT service delivery,” said Subroto Das, COO-India and SAARC, EMC.

Handicapping factors
The biggest hindrance in the adoption of virtualization is the cost factor, as it is seen as an expensive project to undertake. It is also perceived as an expensive platform. There are just a handful of people who understand the technology completely. Network connection can also be a big deterrent to its adoption. Mixing the workload can again be a challenge. And lastly, most of the organizations are unaware of its benefits in terms of RoI. “There are two key factors that are still impeding wider adoption of virtualization-firstly, inability to fully leverage virtualization technologies due to a lack of in-depth technical experience in using and deploying advanced features of virtualization, and secondly, since server virtualization products are expensive, their adoption in India has therefore been slow,” opined Raj Bala, CTO of Cognizant.
As per the views of Midhun Chandran, Architect-Virtualization Practice, Persistent Systems, most of the challenges to adoption of virtualization technologies in India are the same as elsewhere. The distinct characteristic of the Indian market, however, is its price sensitivity. Among the top concerns when evaluating virtualization solution is the ability to reuse this investment. As has been mentioned repeatedly, virtualization is a disruptive technology. Consumers associate it with concentrated risk, higher infrastructure complexity and painful migration and these have been holding them from embracing virtualization whole-heartedly. Moreover, the mere virtualization of a company's IT hardware does not end the virtualization story. The datacenter can, in fact, become more unstable and costly as a direct result of virtualization.
“Limited awareness of the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing are the major challenges being faced by vendors. Besides, security is the biggest concern when people move from physical to virtual as impersonation and theft is very easy,” added Kartik Shahani, Country Manager-India and SAARC, RSA. Besides, skill-gap is again a big issue wherein there is a dearth of trained professionals that can impart training on virtualization technologies. The availability of technical expertise to manage a virtual infrastructure is something that could also be an inhibitor.

Emerging trends
Let us take a look at some of the emerging trends that will provide competitive opportunities for vendors in this space. One of the most significant change occurring in virtualization is the fragmentation of the hypervisor marketshare, which has until now been virtually monopolized by a single vendor. This will ensure competitiveness in terms of technology and of course pricing for the customer. It would also set the momentum for IT environments with multi-hypervisor vendors, managed by vendor agnostic systems management stacks. This will open up the market for independent system management software vendors.
The other major trend is the use of virtualization as a proven platform for delivering production quality business services, unlike in the past, where it was mainly used as a test bed environment. This in turn is again fueling the need for heterogeneous systems management stacks, which can work across the virtual and physical world to give a seamless view of the enterprise. Also, virtualization is seen as a critical evolutionary step in the journey to the cloud, as the whole concept of cloud is based on the premise of virtualization. The shift to cloud is inevitable and its infrastructure will ride on virtualization technologies. Increased deployment of virtualization and shift towards cloud will throw open plenty of opportunities for product companies as well as IT service providers. However, to make best of these opportunities, organizations will have to significantly upgrade their technical know-how to deal with the complexities of virtualization.

Going ahead
The next wave of virtualization will expand beyond servers into infrastructure virtualization. This drives the need to fully realize the advantages of advanced features of virtualization for migration, business continuity and DR. To do so cost effectively, virtual servers and desktops will require equally adept virtual storage solutions that can meet the infrastructure needs of the future while providing fault-tolerant, high-availability, shared storage.
Virtualization has its positives and benefits that outpace the challenges. Organizations need to plan on the areas that require virtualization. Licensing models are evolving, and trickle down has to happen at the mid-market level, as it will warm up the entire concept. Market will pick up only when awareness is created. Skill-sets have to be groomed. The pressure to keep down the costs will help virtualization grow. Here, channels have to play a big role in making it widely available across all the topographies of our country. And due to its evident cost benefits of power and space savings, virtualization will surely gain momentum within the Indian datacenters in the coming years and the India Inc is very optimistic about its increasing adoption in India.

Nivedan Prakash
(nivedanp@cybermedia.co.in)