Virtualisation is the latest buzzword to have caught the imagination of Indian enterprises seeking to harness ever-increasing levels of computer performance. In recent times, enterprises from a diverse background?automobiles, IT or even a dairy major?have realised the benefits of virtualisation and have begun to tap this technology to add efficiency to their systems. The economic downturn too has done its bit and forced enterprises to cut down on their IT costs through various technologies. Virtualisation is one such technology, which is helping enterprises improve their bottom lines and reduce their IT hardware costs.
Take for instance Bajaj Auto. Until recently, the automobile major relied on acquiring new physical servers to support its business growth across its Indian and Indonesian operations. The company soon realised that it would run out of space in its primary datacentre. Rather than build a new datacentre, Bajaj Auto decided to go in for virtualisation. By May this year, the company was running most of its applications from 30 virtual machines.
?Implementing virtualisation enabled us to reduce the number of (server) racks required to host our datacentre hardware from four to one,? says Raghuvir Singh Sohal, manager, management information systems at Bajaj Auto.
Among the leading food processing company in Maharashtra, Chitale Dairy hit a hurdle with its existing IT system. With the business operating across 10 physical servers across two datacentres located in an interior site, some 500 km away from Pune, Chitale found it difficult to source qualified IT staff to run its operations. Fortunately, Chitale found an answer to its problems in virtualising its technology environment. The dairy major consolidated to three physical servers operating in one datacentre that could host 20 virtual servers. For the company?s director, Vishwas Chitale, earlier any problem meant calling an engineer to service it and it would at least take seven hours for the person to reach there and then sort it out.
Virtualisation has enabled Chitale?s company to restore corrupted servers in just 10 minutes and operate round-the-clock. Even deploying a server has become easier. From three to four weeks earlier, it is now being done in three hours flat. It has also cut the hardware acquisition costs by 50% and software by 75% and storage costs by 25%.
Similarly, Patni Computer Systems found it difficult to arrest rising IT management costs, resulting from business growth worldwide. The company wanted to improve application availability, improve performance and replace 100 physical servers at three datacentres.
Logically, virtualisation was the way out. By February 2009, Patni?s IT infrastructure comprised of 250 virtual machines on 50 host servers. Nowadays, 80% of Patni?s virtual machines run product applications and 90% of its internal applications are deployed on these machines. ?We are saving a significant amount of money thanks to server virtualisation,? says Satish Joshi, executive vice-president, Patni Computer Systems.
It is obvious that these companies are realising the benefits of virtualisation and have begun to tap this technology to add efficiency to their systems. Their rationale: virtualisation helps extract the most out of existing computing resources by making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple resources. While enterprises are queuing up for solutions, companies like IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Citrix and VMWare have realised there is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped. VMWare is the leader in this segment with a 44% market share. Microsoft, which launched the service last year, has a market share of about 28%.
?With one-third of the world?s population expected to be on the internet by 2011 and four billion mobile subscribers, there is a staggering amount of data and intelligence being driven by the rapid proliferation of smart sensors and RFID tags,? says Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice-president, IBM India Software Lab.
According to IDC, virtualisation will rise dramatically by 2010. More than 1.7 million servers will be shipped for virtualisation activities, resulting in 7.9 million logical servers. This represents 14.6% of all physical servers in 2010 compared to just 4.5% of server shipments in 2005. A study by Springboard Research says virtualisation software and services market in Asia-Pacific will grow at an estimated 42% to reach $1.35 billion by 2010. Virtualisation services, estimated to grow to $1 billion by 2010, will form a major portion of this market as enterprises will spend two-three times more on services than on software.
The market for virtualisation is growing in India and VMware products are finding quick acceptance among customers here, informs Jim Lenox, general manager, Asia South, VMware. On a cautious note, Gartner has termed virtualisation as a ?revolutionary technology? that will have the highest impact on IT operations till 2012. Yet, it could take another couple of years for the technology to become commonplace in India.