Introduction
It has often been suggested that Ireland lags behind the UK by anything from six to 12 months in the adoption of new technologies in IT. That fact coupled with the relative size of the territory often means that it can be hard to discern from the reports of the major analysts exactly where Ireland ranks in the likes of virtualisation adoption. To tackle that very problem ComputerScope, in association with IBM, conducted a survey among IT professionals to gauge the levels and types of usage of virtualisation in Ireland. With expert comment providing context, the results provide a comprehensive picture of the virtualisation in Irish enterprise.
It may surprise some readers to hear that it has generally been smaller enterprises that have led the movement towards virtualisation in Irish organisations in recent years. It will not be news to the ICT sector itself, which has often noted that smaller organisations have the flexibility and rapid decision making to adopt new technology. They tend not to be leading/bleeding edge, but are often very early adopters of technology for which they can see a clear business advantage. Another factor, undoubtedly, is that they will tend not to have the larger scale legacy infrastructure and investment that inhibit change because of costs, roll-out and project time scales and the unforeseen complexities that all IT professionals know from bitter experience are lurking in the logic.
Squeezing costs
A key factor, according to Stephen Moffatt, IBM data centres consultant, is that Irish organisations have been under severe pressure to squeeze costs out in all possible ways. "So they effectively leapt at clear savings like server consolidation. We now see them leading the way in going the next step to automation. In some ways what has happened is that they have already delivered significant cost savings through virtualisation. So if IT leaders go to their CFO or board and say ‘We’ve identified another 5% we can shave off,’ it’s worth a pat on the back but not much more."
In the last six months or so, said Moffatt, it is clear that IT customers of all kinds and their organisations of any scale are looking for more and better all the time. "We are in a market where users expect improvements in applications and importance every week for those processes and applications that are ubiquitous. Customers, internal users and consumers all expect applications that will perform on any device. It’s a Web 2.0 world, whatever the applications or service."
He uses examples like airline boarding passes on a smartphone or ESB meter readings with an iPhone app. "These are typical of the new expectations and are, to my mind, what is driving the need for automation. Businesses in desperately competitive markets need to get to their customers first with new functions and controls for what they are doing and using." The way that automation relates to virtualisation technology, he explains, is that adding automation to virtualised environments enables the organisation to provision services and functions and resources faster. "Automation means you can provision production environments in minutes and seconds rather than days. In many ways a cloud is simply taking server consolidation plus virtualisation plus automation and the appropriate standardisation and there you have it, a private cloud."
More than one
In larger organisations, penetration of virtualisation has often been slower but there still has been massive investment. "An interesting phenomenon we are now seeing is more than one virtualisation technology in use, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V and our own POWER-VM, with two or more working in the same environment. There are interesting new challenges because in those hybrid virtualised platforms, IT managers still expect to be able to manage them as a single pool of resources. You can have important composite applications with components running on different platforms. Managing all of those distributed application, data and infrastructure components is now a common challenge. It is a level of complexity that arises principally in those larger organisations that have been doing things in virtualisation since about the mid-nineties. But it is obviously going to become more prevalent."
In general, Moffatt says, virtualisation discussions in the last eight years or so have mostly been about smaller scale projects in departments and workgroup type applications. HR and finance, for example, were early ones. "People looked at anything which was not focussed directly on the customer and that could be defined and isolated. Another wave of workloads came to virtualisation after that involving collaboration tools like Lotus Notes Domino or Microsoft SharePoint.
"It really was after that again that really large scale projects involving the big enterprise stuff like ERP, SAP and others, and MRP (manufacturing resource planning), CRM, supply chain and others came into the picture. These are very demanding, high performance applications and we have a long way to go. Automation has a great deal to offer, but we are also coming up against other challenges in, for example, security and governance. Proving compliance along a chain of actions across a fully virtualised environment in a sector like healthcare or financial services is a really tough task."
Mid-size lead
With a view across the markets in the UK as well as Ireland, Dave Ridley is IBM’s brand manager System X and Blade Center. He echoes the point about medium size enterprises leading the way in virtualisation in many respects. "We have also seen local authorities in the UK adopt the technology early. All in all, those organisations were driven initially by server consolidation and are very much still in the market for further consolidation where it can be achieved. I would guess that they have currently virtualised perhaps 40-60% of their IT estates."
As far as applications are concerned, he says, those clients have looked principally at general file and print, communications and collaboration tools: "In essence, anything that is centralised and common across the organisation comes in the first wave. After that, they have been and still are reluctant to venture too quickly into, for example, anything involving serious databases and bespoke applications have largely stayed on their individual platforms."
Cost savings, including energy, have been a driver from the earliest stages, Ridley says. "In truth cost savings are the overall driver. Some clients don’t actually care all that much about the green agenda, although they might like to look green. In others it is a consideration, such as in the public sector where it is mandated, and even if it is not a primary driver it is always valuable in making the business case."
The key appeal of virtualisation technologies to IT professionals is the sheer flexibility it brings to the architecture, he believes. "You can move resources around, deploy virtual machines instantly, even use tools like Tivoli and Systems Director to make the management tasks much simpler, to see the overall picture and bind the whole estate together. More and more we are seeing automation come into that control level, again contributing to the ease and flexibility of deploying resources."
Cost driver
In Ireland specifically, confirming the picture that has emerged from the ComputerScope survey, the drivers were and still are cost savings. "Server consolidation was basic, followed by the ability to have high availability and disaster recovery at a realistic cost point," says Tadhg Cashman, Infrastructure Services director of Morse Ireland. "The consolidation business case is still probably where everything starts, but today’s enterprises, of any scale, are very conscious of speed of change and the importance of availability in our always-on business and consumer world. So the ability to fail over in a controlled and elegant way if a serious problem arises is a very appealing option. It is certainly way ahead of secondary sites and tape recovery and all of the older disaster recovery (DR) technologies."
Morse is seeing a lot more interest in recent times in automated failover. "The Big Red Button solution is very attractive to enterprises that really have to be always available. ‘Press the button, fail over and keep going’ is a very convincing concept in business continuity. We have certainly seen a lot more interest in going that extra step in business continuity (BC) solutions in the last year. Manual recovery is still the most common choice but there is lot more interest in solutions like VMware Site Recovery Manager." Most customer solutions by Morse today involve high availability in the primary site based on, say, four VMware servers with the ability to fail over to the secondary site, said Cashman.
Manageability
An emerging trend but already showing strongly is automation in the virtualised environment. "Manageability is important and appealing to organisations, which are now seeing that top end of virtualisation technology as a way to introduce agility into their infrastructure. We have done such work with one of our leading universities, for example, where they have gone from a provisioning cycle of week to a matter of hours for new VMs and storage. A key driver of that project was the ability to provide campus user groups with a much better set of SLAs. Availability and DR were major elements but in fact the ability to provide differentiated resources quickly to their users was key. They are using multiple VPNs to logically separate the resources and data. Along with that came the resources to allow for much more sophisticated internal billing."
Another major virtualisation growth trend in the Irish market is in the Unix space, Cashman says. "These tend to be in enterprises with high transaction volumes where the solidity and resilience of Unix and AIX has been valued for years, even though it comes with a premium price tag. Financial services and retailing are obvious sectors, joined more recently by online businesses like gambling and gaming. We do a lot of work in AIX virtualisation using VIO and there has been significant uptake in the last six months or so in high end projects."
Results: What you said
If this survey had been an election, the Virtualisation Party would have won in a landslide. A massive 74% of the survey population voted for it and of those a highly impressive 86% yielded immediate control of many key parts of their daily lives. We are talking organisations, of course, so the politics analogy can only go so far. But that 86% using virtualisation technologies in production environments-and by definition mission-critical applications-is a ringing real life endorsement.
Because the high level of responses came from our ComputerScope readers and clearly reflects real life in their organisations, we believe the survey findings can be taken as more significant (at least in a qualitative sense) than unsubtle general market statistics about equipment shipped or software vendor sales.
Fully embraced
The salient point from our ComputerScope survey is that Irish organisations across the sectors have thoroughly embraced virtualisation in most of its forms. Even the 26% which said they were not currently using virtualisation technologies went on to indicate that they were seriously examining it. Quite a few acknowledged that they were in fact already involved with virtualisation to some degree. Most of them professed the firm intention to adopt virtualisation and mentioned short time scales such as ‘end of the year’, six months or ‘expect to introduce in 2012.’
Back to that 74% majority with an active current investment: the pattern is very clear with exactly the same percentage (86%) confirming virtualisation in their production environments as those which stated that the primary reason for looking at the technology was server consolidation. The other acknowledged drivers were cost saving, unsurprisingly, at 73% and its corollary power saving at 54%. One response that clearly shows the level of technical awareness in the market was the 61% which quoted more dynamic resource provisioning as a significant driver.
Test and dev
Equally predictable, given the overall result, is that 69% are using virtualisation for test and development and 77% for line of business applications. Internal services, such as the help desk function, were cited by 55%. The question about the percentage of IT estate virtualised brought a more even response pattern: only 20% claimed that over 70% of their IT was virtualised and another 23% joined them above the 50% point. So even among the adopters with production systems running on virtualised infrastructure the majority were below the 50% level in regard to their total IT estate-57% in all, with 26% of organisations below the 20% of IT estate. That was probably predictable, with some hindsight, given that the benefits and RoI on virtualisation investment will have such a wide potential spread across all of the ICT in any organisation.
The IT industry will of course be curious about the technology league table, but again the results from our survey were largely predictable also, with VMware in pole position at 81% followed by Microsoft at 30% and Citrix at 24%. IBM and Red Hat tied at 7% while Xen.org and Parallels were also mentioned.
Other technologies
A more complex picture emerged with the specifics of technologies currently being used, with Sun and Solaris often mentioned e.g. ‘app zero capsules for older Solaris products’. The Sun/Oracle combination also figured prominently (VirtualBox, LDOMS and containers), together with HP Virtual Machines and partitioning. On the Open side, KVM and OpenNebula cloud toolkit were mentioned and Acronis and Asigra in a DR context.
Any such survey will attempt to establish management reasoning behind decisions, and in that context the leading response (43%) was ‘regard it as inevitable but not yet critical’, an attitude the industry generally has often reported. Just under a third (34%) said virtualisation does not suit current usage or workloads, which at least suggests that they have examined the issues. A perhaps surprising finding was the 11% which said they had ‘evaluated the technology and decided not to use it.’
Recovery
The reasons mentioned for looking at virtualisation covered pretty well the entire gamut of current technology solutions, from the orthodox speed of provisioning, ease of management and greater control to ‘infrastructure refresh’ and the simple ‘space constraints’. But a very clear thread appeared with the vast majority of respondents including DR and business continuity in their lists of drivers, using phrases like ‘faster and simpler recovery’.
The information sources used by survey participants in researching and evaluating virtualisation technology were largely vendor-provided: 73% cited brochures and online material, supplemented by seminars, workshops and other events (51%). Consultations with implementers or service providers were mentioned by 66%, showing clearly that this is where investment intentions get down to the nitty-gritty. Significantly, the trade press scored well, with 39% indicating it as source of information for decision making.
1. Are you currently using virtualisation technologies?
Yes 74%
No 26%
2. Are you using them in a production environment?
Yes 86%
No 14%
3. In which environments are you using virtualisation?
Test and development 69%
Internal services (help desk etc.) 55%
Production/line of business 77%
Other 8%
4. What was your reason for first looking at virtualisation?
Server consolidation 88%
Power saving 54%
Cost saving 73%
More dynamic resource provisioning 61%
Other 11%
5. What percentage of your IT estate is virtualised?
Less than 20% 26%
20-50% 31%
50-70% 23%
Over 70% 20%
6. Which virtualisation technologies are you currently using?
VMware 81%
Microsoft 30%
Citrix 24%
IBM 7%
Red Hat 7%
Xen.org 3%
Parallels 1%
Other 6%
7. If you are not using virtualisation, which of the following best describes your situation?
Evaluated the technology and decided not to use it 11%
Does not suit current usage or workloads 34%
Regard it as inevitable, but not yet critical 43%
Other 19%
8. In researching or evaluating virtualisation technology, what sources did you use?
Vendor materials (brochures, online etc.) 73%
Trade press 39%
Seminars, workshops, events 51%
Consultation with implementers or service providers 66%
Other, please specify 10%
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Fans 0
Followers 0
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