Prakash Sripathy?s valuable 24 years global experience as a consultant and manager in the filed of central processing unit, network communications and computer systems fetched him the position of vice-president of Force10 Networks, a provider of networking solutions for data centre and other network deployments. The company?s solutions include switches and routers. Heading the R&D centre of Force10 at Chennai, Prakash talks to S Saroj Kumar on how virtualisation and green computing are playing out in the times of cloud computing. Excerpts:
Could you define the roadmap in aligning virtualisation with cloud computing?
There are many definitions of cloud computing. If we think of cloud computing as providing a service to a customer, virtualisation becomes an enabler for some types of enterprise customers. To understand this fully, we need to consider three different types of enterprise customers?traditional enterprise customers, hosting customers and portal customers. Traditional enterprise IT departments are starting to consider themselves as cloud service providers to their internal (employees) customers as well as external customers.
Isn?t this a dramatic change in mindset for IT departments, causing them to rethink how they architect their IT infrastructure?
Yes, definitely. But for these enterprise customers, virtualisation is used quite extensively. Virtualisation allows enterprise IT departments to deliver IT services to internal or external customers while maintaining service levels (availability, reliability and performance). For hosting companies, which provide computing environments as a service, virtualisation is a critical part of their infrastructure. Virtualisation allows hosting companies to provide services in an efficient, flexible and dynamic manner.
For portals companies, which provide a single service, or set of services, such as Google, Facebook and Salesforce.com, virtualisation is less common. These enterprise customers rely less on virtualisation technology and more on physical technology. While these types of enterprise customers are clearly part of the cloud computing trend, they do not rely on virtualisation to provide cloud services. So to fully understand the relationship between virtualisation and cloud computing, one needs to realise there are different type of enterprise customers, each with their own requirements.
With the advent of green computing, enterprise customers are embracing virtualisation to reduce carbon foot print. What is the trend in your opinion?
Enterprise customers are continuing to consolidate and virtualise their data centres.
Approximately 80% of medium and large customers are using virtualisation products to help them consolidate their data centres. According to IDC, 2009 was the first year that virtualised servers outshipped non-virtualised servers. This indicates that enterprise customers are strongly embracing virtualisation. Many of the customers we talk to have virtualisation products deployed in their data centres and are planning on virtualising more in the future.
As enterprise customers continue to adopt virtualisation, they are realising that the flexibility they get by deploying virtualisation comes at a cost of increased complexity. Virtualisation adds significant complexity as the number of ?elements? that need to be managed has increased. While customers have reduced the number of physical servers and storage devices they need to manage, the number of virtual elements has grown dramatically. This trend, along with the fact that the global economy is making customers cautious about hiring, is resulting in an increase in interest in automation. Automation allows customers to automate IT functions, addressing this increase in complexity without hiring more IT administrators. The business benefit of automation is a dramatic reduction in operational costs. While consolidation/automation reduced capital expenses, automation is reducing operational costs.
According to Gartner, the Indian data centre business is expected to be around $350 million by 2012? What are your growth estimates in the target period?
Force 10 sees similar estimates for the market. Globally, data centre switching market is the fastest growing segment within Ethernet switching and the top of the rack architecture is the fastest growing architecture within data centres.
