Virtualisation: a vendor's view

Bill Taylor-Mountford General Manager, Acronis A/NZ

Virtualisation is now recognised as one of the fastest-growing sectors of the IT market and according to Gartner analysts, it’s tipped to be one of the most significant technologies influencing the market in 2008. Solution providers are already seeing it account for around 20.3 percent of revenue and this is expected to go up.

While there has been a lot of focus on virtualisation as an enabler of ‘Green’ computing, I believe the real opportunity lies in backup and disaster recovery. It’s my view that eliminating the need for physical server backups is not only logical, but essential to ensure the most efficient and complete disaster recovery. Recovery in the physical world can be extremely expensive, especially if you live by the rule of one application to each server – meaning organisations choose to back-up only critical services. Virtualisation has revolutionised disaster recovery – allowing for affordable, time- and space-efficient, flexible and reliable recovery which can even be performed remotely. If utilised correctly, a virtualised server can provide protection superior to physical backup at a fraction of the cost of hardware-based solutions. Replication is also much simpler and allows for copying of partial data or performance of a full recovery in far less time – even to different hardware.

Efficient disaster recovery goes hand in hand with business continuity. Every business continuity solution for IT begins with a reliable means of protecting the data and virtualisation quite literally makes your data ‘untouchable’. There’s no need to worry about how your data is actually stored, managed or physically located and no time wasted attending to physical system maintenance.

Considering any system downtime results in financial loss, it’s my view that the ability to perform non-disruptive data migration will increasingly be embraced, allowing for data to be moved off over-utilised devices or onto faster storage devices if need be, to make the most of their resources and ensuring optimal system performance.

Having said that, I believe customers’ adoption of virtualisation may require a little coaxing, as many customers find it difficult to put their trust in an emerging technology. You will need to keep in mind that the concept of a ‘virtualised’ environment may still be daunting for some customers and therefore they feel more secure purchasing physical hardware. If it helps, move away from the concept of the server being ‘virtual’ and focus on the benefits it can offer. Make it clear how hardware and management costs can be cut.

In most circumstances, selling virtualisation is becoming easier as the technology is now coherently packaged and the price is more viable for customers. As I mentioned, backup and disaster recovery represent great sales opportunities for virtualisation. However, we can’t ignore the Green angle. In fact, given the amount of publicity it has received, customers are likely to raise this subject early in your conversation. Businesses are becoming increasingly conscious of their carbon footprint and there is mounting pressure for businesses to be responsible and accountable for their energy emissions.

Green computing is also about innovation – something with which the IT industry has extensive experience. So we vendors and partners need to take the initiative and provide our customers with a clear roadmap of the resource implications of the solutions we provide. Virtualisation is one of these tools and is recognised as a form of ‘Green computing’ because it allows for the pooling of IT resources, resulting in more efficient use of these resources and the option of switching off unused servers. Server consolidation allows enterprises to combine the workload from multiple machines, into a single physical system – ultimately reducing physical hardware. Furthermore, an effective virtualised server can offer huge improvements in server utilisation. It’s not uncommon for a computer to use only five to 12 percent of its total capacity – virtualisation allows almost 100 percent server utilisation.

Now we can create virtual (rather than actual) versions of operating systems and applications, allowing several to be run simultaneously from the same computer. Organisations may look at virtualisation as a way for them to do ‘their bit’ to reduce energy emissions. By virtualising the average 2320 square-metre data centre, around 7500 tonnes of carbon emissions can be saved each year. Therefore make sure you’re clued in about how energy consumption is minimised and be able to provide measurable outcomes to demonstrate what this means for them.

The security provided by a virtual environment is also a key selling point. Virtualisation can provide centralised and secure computing environments. It’s imperative to reinforce the fact that systems can be shared whilst keeping sensitive data confidential, as systems can boot up their own virtual environment from an encrypted image.

Of course there’s no harm in highlighting the economic benefits! The monetary savings from virtualisation are substantial. Studies in the US have shown that simply cutting 30 physical servers back to 20 has saved organisations up to US$50,000.

These financial benefits are a direct result of reducing energy emissions alone, never mind the way virtualisation can impact an organisation’s bottom line by saving them space, time and money – so half our work is done.

Bill Taylor-Mountford is the general manager, A/NZ, of Acronis. He has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry including senior roles at Cabletron Systems, Dell and Symantec. Bill is based in Sydney, and has previously worked in the UK, New York, California, Singapore and Malaysia.