Virtualisation taking on the ‘mega vendors‘

“The next virtualisation tsunami will be the desktop around concepts of the thin-clients as a basic network centre. If you think of a typical office with desktops on all day but only using applications such as Word or Excel you can offer seamless end-user experience as a desktop.

“This is finally happening as the cost of storage and server technology gets cheaper.

“For resellers we say that the fundamental implementation is not that complex and customers are prepared to pay for this useful knowledge.

“At a starting amount of as little as $10,000 virtualisation offers a compelling argument with less carbon emissions, less hardware and cheaper to run and this is the way the world is going.”

Dr Kevin McIsaac, analyst with Intelligent Business Research Services (IBRS), backs Blackman, saying that riding on the coat tails of server virtualisation, virtual desktops have become one of the hottest infrastructure topics of 2008.

He describes a virtual desktop as a type of thin desktop where independent desktop environments (operating system and application) are executed on a shared server, with each desktop environment running in its own virtual machine (such as VMware, Xen or VirtualPC).

McIsaac said that discussions about virtual desktops are often clouded by misinformation and unrealistic expectations that obscure the issues and stifle investigation.

“Too often the stated benefits are not closely examined because the answers seem self-evident. Desktop managers who fail to carefully examine each of the stated benefits may find themselves swept away by the hype and end up with an even more expensive and complex desktop environment,” he said.

However, McIsaac said potential problems from a channel perspective associated with virtualisation include the possibility of cannibalising their own sales of hardware.

“Like most things there is a limited margin to be made reselling the product,” McIsaac said. “If selling virtualisation to consolidate multiple workloads on a single machine, the hardware sales will decline and in fact they have been flat the last couple of years,” he said.

“The future for the VAR in all this is to focus on making money up on services.

They should be looking at planning and what can and can’t be virtualised and implementing programs in the IT budget such as disaster recovery.”

Mark Nielsen, storage works product marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard, said there has been a lot of talk about virtualisation from a server perspective but what is really taking off in the market is the storage perspective and delivering in mid-range arrays.

“Virtualisation is not new but it has taken some time to enunciate the benefits of the technology and we are now looking at how can it reduce complexity in environment and simplify management of data and effectively reduce management,” Nielsen said.

“But what resellers need to do now is have a higher level of conversation with customers and linking storage and server environments. What it allows is for our resellers to have much more strategic discussion with customers,” he said.

Nielsen said that the future trend for virtualisation technology is in automating more of an application layer and being able to provide additional capacity for customers.

“There is much more of a link between storage and server and we are now seeing greater automation. This allows resellers to talk to customers at a much more strategic level,” he said.

“We are going to continue to provide the link through virtual and storage applications that offer more automated management and the ability for us to move workloads in the server environment in automated level.

“We will continue to deliver growth in virtualisation array and help customers to be more aware of what they can do in SMB space offering them more agility.”

data centre mega on taking the vendors virtualisation