If the way in which Irish companies are deploying virtualisation is any indicator, it looks like the technology is here to stay.
A growing number of organisations are choosing to roll the technology out not just for their non-core storage and infrastructure needs but also for their mission critical line of business applications. In doing so, they’re giving virtualisation a vote of confidence, saying that they think it’s reliable, offers a compelling business case and can help them pursue their business goals.
However not all companies using virtualisation are quite there yet and many are still experimenting at the back end before fully committing themselves with their applications and services they depend on to service their customers.
Maturity
"Virtualisation has been around for a long time at this stage, as a technology it’s mature," said Hilary O’Meara, a senior executive with Accenture. "When a company embraces virtualisation, in our experience it’s always driven by some kind of business change-there’s always a catalyst of some kind in the organisation that drives it."
"Sometimes that’s cost optimisation, or the drive to deliver better service to the business, or something else entirely but usually companies will roll out a virtualised test server to dip their toes in the water. Then when they see that they can stand up and stand down environments as they need them, that they can control how long an environment is allocated to a particular business project and that there are a tonne of other advantages that makes managing their servers so much easier, they’re usually sold."
"It’s a big cultural change for an organisation to move to a virtual desktop environment, but sometimes it just makes sense. For example, we’re seeing quite a few companies faced with issued surrounding moving to Windows 7. In some cases their desktop PCs can’t support Windows 7 but instead of upgrading their hardware, they’re moving to a virtualised desktop environment. There’s a business driver-it’s a major cost saving. Not only is that cheaper, it’s also a hell of a lot quicker to roll out."
This is a factor that others in the industry credit with sustaining the growth of virtualisation and encouraging companies to use it to support the delivery of core applications.
Desktop progression
"We recently ran a survey in the Irish market which showed that 52% of Irish companies that responded said they had or were planning to invest in desktop virtualisation," said Patrick Irwin, product marketing manager at Citrix.
"Of those planning to invest, 59% said they’d be doing it in the next year. That’s reflected in our business-if you look at our published figures for last year, the desktop side of the business accounted for around 60% of our overall business and that shows us that a lot of people are moving that way," he said.
"To be honest at this point, they’d be fools not to."
Citrix clearly has a vested interest in promoting virtualisation, as do all companies operating in this area, but it’s hard to argue with this assessment. ComputerScope recently conducted its own study and its findings broadly agree with Citrix’s. Of 343 respondents, 74% said they were currently using virtualisation technologies, and 86% of that group said they were doing so in a production environment.
When asked why they had first looked at virtualisation, 88% said they were interested in server consolidation and 73% said cost savings were the main reason.
"The ComputerScope figures reflect what we’re seeing in the market. When it comes to medium or even small sized business, the sheer cost savings that can be realised when you take eight or 10 physical servers and replace them with one or two physical boxes running virtual servers just can’t be ignored," said Irwin.
"Given the pressure companies are under to save costs, that’s a big deal. That’s pushed people from experimentation to adoption. We’re not seeing our customers just doing this for niche or low risk parts of their business; we’re seeing them push their core activities onto virtualised platforms."
Left behind
"Virtualisation is shaping businesses for the future-if Irish businesses are not doing it or planning to do it quite soon they’re going to be left behind. They need to adapt, change and innovate-if they’re not doing it, their competitors certainly will be. There is a general move away from the kind of fixed infrastructure that business has been based on for the last 15 years or so, to a more agile virtualised version."
"If there are people out there thinking about either server or desktop virtualisation who haven’t done it yet, they’re potentially limiting how that business can react to market conditions in the future," he said.
Another factor driving companies to deliver their mission critical and core line of business applications using virtualisation is the way in which this technology enables access from a wide variety of devices, according to George Dowling, solutions architect with Ergo.
"Some analysts estimate that between 30 and 40% of all current applications are web enabled. This is important as it means data can be easily accessed from any client device type. The proliferation of smart devices has led to line of business applications that are not capable of being web enabled because of re-development costs, being virtualised instead."
"What the IT department wants to do is deliver these line of business apps to the end user-that’s the purpose of IT when you think about it. If we have virtualised the applications then hardware and the operating system become commodity items refreshed as part of the break and fix process as opposed to a disruptive planned migration project."
Hardware demand
The effects of the market’s reaction to virtualisation can be seen in some interesting ways, according to Mark McKeon, sales director for Hewlett Packard Ireland, such as in how it’s changing the nature of demand for certain types of hardware.
"The technology has changed-where people were buying racked servers, they’re now buying bladed servers and that tells us there’s a different approach being taken in terms of how they’re set up. Most storage you can buy now is capable of being virtualised out of the box," he said.
"From an infrastructure perspective, we see virtualisation as a fairly mature technology, most organisations that have any sort of IT competency will be some way down the road of virtualisation, and not just with infrastructure. They’re often looking at virtualised storage, networking, desktop infrastructure projects-it’s become a de facto standard."
"The virtualisation proposition isn’t just around infrastructure savings-you can get up to 35 or 40% savings in operational costs and from an efficiency perspective you can drive that to 200 or more per cent. It’s driving into the public sector and the semi states as well. The big guys basically do it first, but as it has become a de facto technology, companies at every level are doing it," said McKeon.
Sandpit
There is a tried and trusted way of rolling out any major new technology-establishing a metaphorical sandpit, and according to Magnet’s Joe Lavin virtualisation lends itself exceptionally well to this approach.
"You do this before you deploy something into a live environment, to test that technology so if you are making any changes to your applications or upgrading to new versions, you can do it there first," he said. "You typically keep that test environment running even post launch."
"Virtualisation allows you to do that with one piece of hardware-you can configure one machine to run multiple virtual machines. That gives you the opportunity to create a test environment that mimics a much larger live deployment and you can do that on just a few pieces of hardware."
Lavin says that Magnet is a test case for the benefits of virtualisation in that most of its mission critical line of business applications, are fully virtualised.
"We’re a bit unusual though in that we’re very cloud focussed and our customer relationship management and billing functions are fully cloud based. In terms of the services we sell, there are two key cloud apps we provide to customers-one is hosting, which is running in a fully virtualised environment for all of our customers, and the other is our hosted PBX telephony system."
"That’s also running in a virtualised environment and that allows us to have a bank of servers, a cluster, running in multiple locations but acting as one seamless virtualised environment."
In terms of how Magnet customers are using virtualisation, Lavin says that one interesting trend is the way in which the technology is being used to extend the lifespan of legacy applications.
Legacy run
"What we’re seeing with some of our larger clients when we talk to them about cloud applications and virtualisation is that some are using virtualisation in-house first. They may have their own in-house applications running in virtualised environments because they run on old operating systems that may not be fully supported anymore."
It’s easy to see why companies with the resources to support such a move are choosing to allow virtualisation to reach more deeply into their IT operations. However fully virtualising core applications is not without potential problems, and there can be hidden licensing problems lurking in the wings for companies that buy into it wholesale, particularly those that commit their mission critical line of business applications to the technology.
According to Howard Roberts, technical director of infrastructure and services company Arkphire, the issue of just how licenses are being charged for is presenting issues for companies deeply committed to virtualisation.
x86 world
"The technology now is definitely capable of handling even the largest workloads-there are quite a few examples of large scale mission critical applications running in a virtualised environment safely and without a problem," he said. "Most workloads can be virtualised now-they do take a little bit of redesigning and tweaking, but in the x86 world, there’s very little that can’t be put into virtualised infrastructure at this stage. That’s not the issue."
"However, what we’re seeing lately that’s restricting further growth in this area is the confusion being caused by the software vendors. A number of the major players in the area have abruptly and with little warning changed the way they charge out for their products, and that’s making people extremely nervous."
"This has always been an issue with Oracle in this area because it licenses based on the cluster and that’s a deterrent for people coming from the traditional VMware approach thinking about virtualising Oracle products. You have to work around the licensing issues, and that’s put a lot of people off."
"We’re now seeing a similar issue happening with Microsoft because it’s just announced a new licensing model for SQL-it’s worse really, because they’re approaching licensing on a per-core basis."
Fundamental change
Roberts suggests that changes like these can fundamentally affect the business case for many companies thinking of moving into virtualised territory that could be very hard to reverse out of. No chief technology officer wants to evangelise a technology to their board on the basis of cost savings, only to find that they have to go back a year later and explain why costs have gone up.
"When licensing issues like these come out of leftfield, that’s the kind of thing that knocks tier one virtualisation projects on the head. It happened the same way in the world of virtual desktop infrastructure when Microsoft issued its virtual desktop access (VDA) license- that blew most of the business case out of the water."
"There have been changes in the way VMware is priced as well-when VSphere 5 was released they announced a licensing change that moved away from a per-CPU cost to a VRAM cost and that caused a level of nervousness as well. For some people that didn’t matter much because they were running a small environment, but for the big players that was a big cost increase," he said.
"A battle ensued between the customers and VMware, and they backtracked and doubled the VRAM allowance. But these kinds of issues make people extremely nervous about putting all their assets into the virtualised arena and exposing themselves to changing costs that are completely outside their control."
Ltd
