Virtualization: Undergoing Makeover

With virtualization supposed to unlock the door to cloud computing, vendors are starting to offer multiple solutions

As the year 2012 headed towards the end, hopes had risen in the domain of IT over the high rate of adoption of virtualization and the growth it poised to bring in.

According to IDC Semiannual Software Tracker report, Virtualization, Collaborative Applications and CRM Applications showed the best performance during the first half of 2012. For the period, the worldwide software market grew 4.7% year over year, reaching a total market size of $167 bn, which was in line with IDC's forecast.

On a regional basis, the overall software market was heavily influenced by the downward trend in Western Europe, which represents more than 27% of the worldwide market and was the only region to experience negative growth in 1H12. The US market, which represents more than 45% of the overall market, grew 6.8% year over year, while the emerging markets in Latin America and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) also experienced solid year-over-year growth. The countries with the greatest growth in 1H12 were Colombia, Russia, Philippines, China, Peru, and New Zealand.

Among the three primary segments of ‘commercial' software in IDC's software taxonomy, the applications segment, which holds almost 49% of overall market share, was the fastest growing market group with a 5.1% year-over-year growth rate. The applications market was largely driven by the Collaborative Applications and CRM Applications markets. Within the other two primary ‘commercial' software segments, Application Development and Deployment (AD&D) and System Infrastructure Software, the most positive growth rates came from the Virtualization-related markets.

Further, the AMI partners study also supported the facts presented by IDC stating that although the virtualization market in India is still at a nascent stage, there are significant growth opportunities across server, desktop and storage virtualization. Of the total IT installed base in the country, only 5 to 10% have been virtualized so far, which indeed came in as a big surprise for the enterprise CIOs and vendors alike. Through secondary research AMI has concluded that the small and medium business segment (SMBs; companies with fewer than 999 employees) comprises about 30% of the India virtualization market and is likely to grow exponentially in the next few years.

The study has further stated that this growth will be driven by a need to increase operational efficiencies. The size of this untapped market is considerable, presenting a huge growth potential for leading participants in the market.

"What makes this industry unique is that the participants compete as well as collaborate to offer best-of-breed solutions to the end users," said Shweta Baidya, senior research analyst at AMI India.

Desktop virtualization is being adopted by organizations where the cost of maintaining desktops is high; it serves to reduce overall operational expenditures. The key driver for server virtualization is the reduction of overall capital expenditure. Also driving this technology is the need for easy data recovery and business continuity. It is amidst this backdrop that virtualization has come into focus with vendors like VMware, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and other majors thinking of the solution as one of the major areas of revenue maximization.

The importance of pure virtualization solutions in both FY11 and FY12 can be understood by merely breaking up the revenue of Citrix; one of the most prominent global players in this field. In FY11, 58% of Citrix's revenues (worldwide) came from desktop virtualization, 20% from cloud networking and 22% from social collaboration. However, what is poised to come in as a surprise is that by 2015, the share from desktop virtualization is expected to reduce to less than half the overall pie for Citrix!

Competition, however, in this field has grown steadily with each of the vendors playing their cards safe in this field; particularly targeting the SMBs through their channel partners. Each of the vendors have gradually come up with a suite of virtualization solutions catered to meet niche needs of the SMB particularly.

As an example, IBM has a holistic suite of virtualization solutions ranging from Server consolidation and storage consolidation solutions to Data center automation and Optimized cloud delivery solutions with another pack of Virtualization management solutions. In fact, IBM is not only providing solutions with the choice of opting for one pack or opt for a combo offer, but is also providing open virtualization and networking and services as part of its infrastructural suite.

VMware, the channel leader of 2012 (Channel Satisfaction Survey 2012) on the other hand is keeping it tight over servers and network only. According to VMware, with software-defined networking, virtualization principles are applied to network resources, abstracting, pooling and automating them to transcend the limitations of rigid physical architectures. Network services are assigned to each application and remain with it, elastically adapting to its changing requirements. Virtualized networking simplifies provisioning, enhances scalability, simplifies management, and lowers operational costs.
Citrix has been focussing over desktop and servers in the field of virtualization. It has XenDesktop as the product for desktop virtualization, which, according to Citrix is a comprehensive desktop virtualization solution that includes all the capabilities required to deliver desktops, apps and data securely to every user in an enterprise. Instead of juggling thousands of static desktop images, it can manage and update the OS and apps once, from one location, then deliver desktops and apps that are customized to meet the performance, security and mobility requirements of each individual worker. On the other hand, with its product XenServer (for Server virtualization), each virtual machine is completely isolated from other machines and is decoupled from the underlying host by a thin layer of software known as a hypervisor. This allows each virtual machine to run different operating systems and applications. Because the machines have been decoupled from the underlying host, the guest can also be moved from one physical server host to another while running, this is known as live migration.

On the other hand, Microsoft, the forerunner in this field, is limited with the products for servers and enterprise applications virtualization alongwith the facility of migrating from VMware. However, if the revelations of AMI India and IDC are to be believed, virtualization, since its hype in 2009, hasn't come of age yet in India although products have been stockpiled and lined up from most of the prominent vendors. The primary challenge, it seems is the rate of adoption among the corporate clients who are more keen to opt for a cloud solution and apps migration rather than go for a virtualised environment. However, Symantec has come up with an interesting fact stating that Mobile Computing, Virtualization and Cloud are driving data center complexity in India.

Following the findings of the 2012 State of the Data Centre Survey, the security major concluded that organizations of all sizes, industries and regions report increasing complexity within the data center impacting all areas of computing, most notably security and infrastructure, as well as disaster recovery, storage and compliance. Indian respondents rated complexity across all areas fairly evenly.

Furthermore, according to the same survey, although organizations are implementing or interested in implementing several measures to reduce complexity, including training, standardization, centralization, virtualization, and increased budgets, yet the IT budget allocation is primarily preventing organizations from facing the challenge. On the other hand, on the same technical aspect, managing virtualization is itself a challenge as virtual servers too, like their physical counterparts require patch management, performance tuning and troubleshooting of errors. Hence, for a CIO, apart from maintaining the physical server, the maintenance of the virtual one adds up to the workload requiring continuous support and maintenance service packs from the system integrators.

"Organization across India are now adopting virtual desktops proliferating use cases such as BYO, workshifting, protection of intellectual IT, security etc. and also facilitating enterprise mobility. Server virtualization is moving towards open source where organizations are opting open source solutions such as Xen and KVM instead of the proprietary vendors," said Nilesh Goradia, head, pre-sales, India Subcontinent, Citrix.

"Initially applications were built on Windows due to its ubiquitous presence. Now with the proliferation of multitude of Operating Systems and different form-factor devices, there is a huge demand for delivering windows-based applications on non-windows based platforms such as iOS and Android as well as on devices such as thin clients, tablets and mobiles. Our XenApp solution allows porting of Windows based applications to iOS or Android based platforms," he added.

Even as the rate of virtualization remains low in India with market research agencies predicting a growth in the near future, the competition to virtualization solutions is knocking on Indian doors. Best-of-Breed (BoB) is the new concept, which, according to EMC is going to take Indian IT by storm in 2013. The concept of BoB revolves around the idea of integrating the best in class solutions for an organization to achieve optimal efficiency in its functioning as well as integrate the solutions in such a way to secure proper functionality. The problem which arises here in relation to the numerous software packages and apps integration apart from the evergrowing need for ‘more storage space' as well as ‘optimal apps integration' either over the cloud platform or on the physical local drive can be best analysed in terms of the storage virtualization solutions falling in line with the BoB concept.

"Storage virtualization is the bare minimum requirement to build an agile and fluid cloud storage infrastructure. While organizations have tried to implement cloud services without this technology, they are limited with regard to flexibility. Storage virtualization allows users to scale up and scale down based on the requirements of end customers for cloud offerings," said Yogesh Sawant, director, partner sales and Field Alliance Organization (India), Hitachi Data Systems.

"Any partner or customer planning to invest in information management infrastructure would be keen to deploy these technologies. Today all infrastructures in the datacentre is virtualized and this is now universally accepted by all customers across all verticals. Today, the government vertical has also realized the importance of storage virtualization which is being accepted and implemented in its datacentres today," Sawant said.
On the other hand, Garter had predicted in 2009 that by the end of 2013, nearly 40% of global corporate PCs will be on a virtualized environment which, according to recent surveys hasn't turned out to fall in line with the prediction. However, with the rise of BoB and different patterns of Cloud, the Indian IT solutions space is sure to get crammed in 2013 with BoB requiring virtualization of storage as a precondition for the success of BoB and Cloud solutions offering complete virtual data storage in data centre unknown to the client. Furthermore, the entire enterprise IT set-up can be substituted for cloud. However, Virtualization and Cloud are not alternatives although the later is a derivative of the former. In the current scenario, virtualization is often looked upon as the enabler of cloud and not just an off-shoot of the same. "When providing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or DaaS (Desktop as a Service), one cannot imagine the existence of cloud without virtualization. Hence virtualization becomes the backbone of a cloud solution," Goradia stated.

"A growth in cloud market will in turn result in the growth of virtualization market. Virtualization solutions will never face threat from the cloud since both complement each other. If enterprises are not virtualizing their datacenters, they will anyway have to access resources which are virtualized from the cloud," Goradia opined. For virtualization as well as cloud solutions, 2013 will remain important as this will be the decisive year when cannibalization of virtualization by cloud and the expected onslaught of BoB is supposed to take place. Only if BoB fails to draw the required attention from the CIOs and clients continue to remain susceptive of Cloud, virtualization will have a future globally, else, the end-route for virtualization is just about to start.