More and more businesses are turning towards virtualisation solutions in their quest to reduce costs, simplify disaster recovery and overall management, achieve accelerated application and desktop deployment as well as conserve energy and space.
According to Mark Edwards, director: Products and Services at Intuate Group, virtualisation is also a key enabler of green IT. “Companies striving to operate more efficiently can consolidate up to 10 physical servers onto a blade server system, with a common power supply, connectivity and SAN interfaces, thereby reducing floor space and power utilisation dramatically. By further running virtualisation on each of the servers, a compound saving of up to a tenth of the normal operating costs can be achieved and power consumption can be reduced by up to 75%,” he says.
Gartner research analysts expect virtualisation software revenue to increase by 55% in 2009 in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market, with the primary source of growth being in the server virtualisation management space, at an expected increase of 54.3%.
As part of this growth, Edwards predicts the market will see companies increasingly opting for Microsoft's Hyper-V offering. “VMware has long been the established leader in terms of operating systems and has set the benchmark, but Microsoft is now aggressively pursuing the virtualisation market,” he says.
“Although the recently launched Hyper-V software is still somewhat immature, Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into making it a viable option for clients. In addition, while VMware has proven its maturity, the software cost per processor of the required physical server may well be its Achilles heel, because companies running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 have access to Hyper-V at an extremely low cost,” he explains.
“However, virtualisation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Depending on a company's requirements and the applications involved, to implement an optimal combination of virtualisation technologies would be the best strategy. Some applications will run significantly better on VMware, but we expect companies to virtualise all Microsoft services on Hyper-V as it will be developed and tested specifically for those applications. Many major organisations around the globe are already implementing a combination of different brands and solutions.
“In fact, apart from well marketed solutions such as VMware and Microsoft, there are several other, less well-known tools and products available, all with different features and benefits differentiating each one. It is all about selecting the right ones according to each business' budget and requirements,” says Edwards.
Application virtualisation is another area currently creating renewed hype, enabling organisations to deploy or update software on multiple operating systems, in parts, according to demand and priority. According to Edwards, this kind of practice has been around for about 15 years, well known as “terminal services”, but has recently started gaining renewed popularity.
“For organisations with multiple workstations in different branches across the country, performing upgrades and maintaining software physically on each individual machine takes a lot of time and effort. With application virtualisation, companies can install the software on one server, making it available to workstations linked by the network. Although more bandwidth is required, the benefit is that the cost and management control is centralised, making it easier for companies to monitor,” he says.
Plus, with the cost of bandwidth expected to go down after the completion of the undersea cables and the growing status of competitive players, the industry should see dramatic changes. For instance, software such as Microsoft Office can become available as a service - with users being able to log on to a central site such as a Web browser to access and use the required applications.
But Edwards does not see this happening soon. “In the short term, connectivity providers just don't have the capacity to offer low-cost bandwidth. The initial investment that they will have to make will need to be recouped somehow and will most likely keep the bandwidth prices up. We still have a long way to go before anyone will be a serious competitor to Telkom and significantly bring down the cost of bandwidth for an individual user,” he concludes.
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