Despite the hype, the virtualization scenario in India is laced with implementation challenges and cost pitfalls.
Mehak Chawla finds out the causes for reluctant adoption and what needs to be done for virtualization to live up to its image
In a newsletter issued by an IT giant for its US customers last week, I stumbled upon the sentence “We think virtualization will be the hottest technology in 2011. It shall be adopted across verticals and shall even reach the product level apart from storage and server virtualization.” That got me thinking. Virtualization has been on the hot-list of every technology analyst for a couple of years now. It has been touted as seeing massive adoption.
Has the adoption of this technology really gained critical mass in India? In a discussion revolving around virtualization a couple of months back, some CIOs complained of costs actually going up because of virtualization. Some of them even wanted to move back to a non-virtualized environment and several implementation challenges were also bought to the fore.
On the other side, there were also a significant number of CIOs and IT folk who agreed that virtualization is one technology that is living up to its promise of cost benefits.
Two things are clear about virtualization. Firstly, there is a lot of hype around the technology and it is indeed creating a lot of ripples. Secondly, there is a lot of confusion around it too. Awareness seems to be lacking.
Still being piloted
As of now, most organizations haven’t gone in for virtualization or even if they have their efforts are limited to pockets. This can be clearly seen from the fact that, as per IDC, only 5.6% of the servers in India have been virtualized. The corresponding figure for percentage of storage capacity that has been virtualized stands even lower at 1.9%. While the figures are disappointing, they have a story to tell. These adoption trends indicate that, as far as virtualization goes, Indian CIOs are still in low gear. They are going about it slowly and testing out the concept with pilot projects. Then there’s the fact that a lot of implementations have not had rosy stories to tell.
Harish Pai, AGM, Information Systems, Kurlon Limited, commented, “IT heads are still experimenting with the technology when it comes to virtualization because there is a lot of uncertainty about it.”
Having said that, large enterprises are adopting virtualization with a zeal and this is where most virtualization vendors are getting a major chunk of their moolah from.
Even for large organizations, server and storage stories differ significantly. Amol Mitra, Marketing Director, HP ProCurve Networking APAC and Japan, said, “Server virtualization is the urgent need of the hour with the number of servers increasing by the day. Storage virtualization will be the urgent need of the future.”
However, for the biggies, there are not only clear economies of scale in implementing virtualization, the investments also make more sense for these organizations.
So, is the Indian market not responding as per expectations to virtualization? According to Vivekanand Venugopal, VP and GM-India, Hitachi Data Systems, that is not true. “The response from the Indian market has been phenomenal, but has it been across the board? The answer to that is a clear ‘No’”, he stated.
Reasons for slow uptake
According to a report by Gartner that came out in October 2010, “Virtualization will be the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015”. The special report on virtualization said that “More than 80% of enterprises now have a virtualization program or project, but only 25% of all server workloads will be in a virtual machine (VM) by year-end 2010.”
“Virtualization will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge,” said Philip Dawson, Research Vice President at Gartner. “Virtualization now drives efficient IT from all angles, including data center design, platform updates, application and infrastructure modernization, as well as traditional and new delivery models, such as infrastructure utility and cloud computing. However, it does take investment; the savings are not a given.”
His statement that savings are not a given, does explain, to some extent, as to why there is a lot of reluctance for virtualizing in a price-sensitive market like India. Vendors, on the contrary, swear by the cost cutting that their technologies can deliver.
According to Venugopal, “Customers can achieve 33% cost reduction on TCO in the first year itself. The savings on CAPEX could be between 20-40%.”
Deepak Varma, Pre-Sales Head, India and SAARC, EMC echoed the same, “The return on investment in terms of virtualization is certain and visible in the first year of implementation. The exact RoI however depends on the scale and type of implementation and it often differs from organization to organization.”
Seeing this, one realizes that there is an obvious mismatch between vendors’ claims and customers’ realizations.
Major challenges
The gap that exists in India between the on-paper and in-effect results of virtualization is not only quite visible but it also has various reasons attached to it.
According to IDC, the top challenges in terms of server virtualization are complexity, lack of technical expertise, capacity planning and utilization of virtualization features. Thanks to these factors, quite a few CIOs, specially those belonging to mid-sized organizations, tend to believe that they either don’t require virtualization or that they can’t handle a virtualized environment.
Venugopal pointed out the technical challenges of server virtualization. “Why does server virtualization fail? The primary reason is that it does not integrate with storage that hasn’t been virtualized. Moreover, manual virtualization of storage calls for down-time,” he explained. “Virtualization fails because no one has the ability to move data non-destructively,” he added.
Another big challenge is multi-vendor management. Most companies have legacy systems and these are often from different storage and server vendors. The inability to command and control multi vendor storage arrays, therefore, results in a lot of failures.
In many of these cases, customers end up paying more for implementation and maintenance. No wonder then that unanticipated costs figure as one of the top reasons for CIOs not willing to virtualize or to virtualize fully.
Deploying virtualization in pockets leads to its own set of problems. If a company faces manageability problems right in the first leg of its virtualization journey, the chances of it progressing full steam ahead are slim. Sumit Mukhija, National Sales Manager-Data Center, Cisco India & SAARC, explained, “Virtualization in pockets can have unintended consequences that limit its effectiveness as well as create complicated and potentially costly security and regulatory compliance concerns. A considered virtualization strategy is essential to provide the best for customers and, to this end, organizations looking at virtualization should appreciate the value of an infrastructure audit by a leading technology consultant, so as to ascertain the extent of virtualization that would be most beneficial.”
The biggest challenge for storage virtualization, on the other hand, is that most companies think that they don’t need to virtualize their storage at all. That comes as a bit of a shock, especially when tiered storage has become more of a practice than a trend.
That brings us to the awareness angle.
Building awareness
If there is one thing that all the parties (vendors, CIOs and analysts) concur upon, it the notion that India, as a market still has a lot of homework to do in terms of creating awareness about virtualization. Understanding exactly what virtualization is and then going about implementing it in sync with business goals is a task that many organizations don’t take too seriously.
Varma said, “Setting your needs and expectations right is something that every organization needs to do before embarking on a virtualization journey.” Venugopal agreed, “Customers who understand cost structures are okay with virtualization. Others struggle with it.”
Vendors agree that they have a huge role to play as far as the awareness bit goes. Venugopal said, “To begin with, we make ourselves clearly understand what the customer wants. What is the problem that he is trying to solve? Is it the cost of management, software licensing, technology refresh or something else altogether? We have identified and listed 33 such pointers and costs.”
Return on Investment (RoI) is another concept that needs to be defogged when it comes to virtualization. RoI can be perceived in different ways by both customers and vendors. At the basic level, RoI means the time that it takes for an investment to pay back. However, the customer may also want to take into account return on assets and total cost of ownership when calculating the RoI. In such cases, it is important for both the vendor and the customer to be on the same page in terms of costs and returns.
The other important thing that needs to be considered while going virtual is software licensing. Customers end up buying a lot of proprietary software and that escalates the cost. Also, you require a common management software to consolidate multiple arrays. The need of the hour is to develop and practice open standards for virtualization.
Stairway to the Cloud
Despite the basket of challenges, hope is alive and flourishing for virtualization. The Cloud is turning out to be the biggest ticket for
virtualization. It shouldn’t surprise us that almost all virtualization vendors are busy propagating Cloud computing. EMC, Cisco, VMware and Orange Business Services recently formed a global business alliance for promoting the Cloud.
Virtualization is the simplest stepping stone for moving onto the Cloud. According to Rajesh Janey, President, India and SAARC, NetApp, “Cloud computing is going to make more and more organizations virtualize and vice versa.”
Venugopal said, “If the Cloud is to accelerate at the rate that has been predicted, then customers will certainly need to virtualize.”
In fact, the Cloud is expected to take virtualization to the next level for things like automating the composition and management of virtualized resources, desktop virtualization and even production and lifecycle virtualization.
Going by these, we shouldn’t be surprised that virtualization still figures in the list of top technologies for 2011 of almost every analyst!
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