Virtualisation taking on the ‘mega vendors‘

Ed Havlik, country manager for Australia and New Zealand at Avocent, said many are jumping on the virtualisation bandwagon.

“VMware is the hottest thing in Australia with 60 percent of Asia Pacific licences for VMware held in Australia,” Havlik said.

“Virtualisation goes back to the old days of mainframes in the US and the success from virtualisation has been in that it allows for the use of a single server to maximise capability through VMware implementation.”

Havlik said that while the virtualisation market leader is VMware, competitors including Zen and Microsoft are making considerable inroads.

“While Microsoft has always been behind the curve on applications, I see in the future the software will become more dominant mostly because of Microsoft’s deep pockets and licensing capability,” he said.

“They are giving way to a shift in the market and Microsoft will end up, as in other markets, dominating the industry.”

Havlik agrees with his colleagues in that the next growth area for virtualisation is in desktops.

“The desktop issue is where a whole new growth area is beginning to appear. To me the word is that we are in the early stages of a potential where the sky is the limit for doing more with less whether it is desktop or server,” he said.

Steve Kelly, channel director Australia and New Zealand, Hitachi Data Systems, said storage is a significant market for virtualisation applications.

He said the continued need for higher-capacity networked storage creates demand for storage virtualisation as enterprise data centres work to leverage existing assets, reduce costs, and simplify storage management.

“Many partners providing server virtualisation are also finding that their clients are needing storage virtualisation infrastructure,” Kelly said.

“But it is not new. For many years we have been offering systems such as IBM mainframes in a big box down to little boxes in economies of scale but we are now seeing virtualisation shift into the mainstream.

“Virtualisation storage might mean you have one or two SANs and a variety of applications that vendors want to bring all together to use for storage as a whole,” he said.

“The cool thing is that you can build new storage and migrate applications seamlessly between blades and offer storage online according to demand.”

In terms of the channel going forward, Kelly said they should look at more value- added services.

“They should be moving towards offering managed services – not just equipment – but conversation about me as business partner or as a reseller of storage on demand.”

Kelly said partners should be offering storage economics. For instance, on how to consolidate storage and customise storage managed services.

He said the biggest trend in storage is with the massive increase in disk space required to accommodate the exponential growth in unstructured data expected between 2008 and 2015.

The reseller must be able to talk around intelligence in storage array and how they can differentiate around smart infrastructure.

“We can provide this and act as a tipping point so partners can offer value-added smarts,” Kelly said.

“Organisations are aggressively moving forward to make their IT dynamic by introducing virtualisation to their server, storage, application and desktop environments,” he said.

data centre mega on taking the vendors virtualisation