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Ravi Shekhar Pandey

Virtualisation has emerged as one of the hottest technologies in the past few months. It’s hot not just because it’s being talked about a lot or has created one of the most valuable companies in Silicon Valley (Virtualisation pioneer VMware is worth more than $20 billion after its recent IPO), but more so because it is beginning to create a real impact in the IT world.

As with many other technologies, while there’s surely an element of hype surrounding it, the benefits of virtualisation are real.

What exactly is virtualisation? Simply put, it is a technique that makes a single physical resource or hardware (such as a computer, a server or a storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources. It is a technology that makes software hardware-independent. Or you can say virtualisation separates the machine from the software and several Operating Systems (OS)/software applications can share the same hardware resources.

This opens up immense possibilities and makes hardware, such as server or PC, a much more powerful machine as you can have several virtual computers on one physical machine. The virtual machines can be running different operating systems and can have different software running in them — all on a single piece of hardware. In other words, with virtualisation, your one server or one computer can do work for which you would otherwise need several servers or computers. So if you earlier needed 10 servers to run 10 different applications, you can now run all of them in one machine.

What kind of benefits is virtualisation bringing in? Let us try to understand it with a real-life case study — a leading global telecommunications provider reduced the number of its servers from around 1,350 to 100 (even as it deployed more than 1,700 new applications) using virtualisation technologies. In other words, only 100 servers could now do what earlier required 1,350 or more servers! (The process of reducing the number of servers using virtualisation is also referred to as server consolidation).

What benefits did this bring the telecom company? Plenty. On one hand, it was able to save around $1 million annually from reduced power consumption — as it had now less number of servers to run, its power consumption decreased by around 880KW; on the other hand, it saved around $2 million from the reduced floor space that the fewer number of servers now occupied. Besides that, the telecom company was now spending around 70 per cent less on server management as that became far less complex and required fewer technical and manpower resources.

All this essentially means that virtualisation as a technology is helping organisations optimise their IT resources as they can do more with less.

A typical non-virtualised IT set-up in an organisation would need multiple servers to run multiple operating systems or applications.

However, as the above case study illustrates, if businesses virtualised their servers, they will need less number of servers as they can run multiple applications on multiple operating systems on a single server, thus saving themselves money by getting more out of their server hardware. They can simplify server management and also cut down on costly manpower resources needed to manage an army of servers.

Which way is Virtualisation going? Even though it has been around for decades, it is only in the past few years that virtualisation has begun making a real impact in the IT world.

From servers, it’s moving on to storage, desktops, networks and other elements of the IT infrastructure. One of the most powerful influences it is going to have is on the way we use our PCs.

Already some PC vendors are offering PCs with virtualisation built-in. This means that if you have a PC running Windows Vista, you can also run Linux or MC OS on it or if you have a Mac PC, you can also run a Vista OS on it.

Not only that, virtualisation can enable you to carry your entire PC (all the software, data and settings on it) on a USB or an iPod-like device!

Virtualisation is beginning to impact IT vendor revenues as customers are now buying fewer servers because they can do more with less.

The Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, recently blamed virtualisation technology for Sun’s declining server revenue. Besides that, virtualisation is also helping both IT vendors and their customers achieve the goals of a more environment-friendly IT.

After all, if you have fewer pieces of hardware running, you can save on energy consumption and also contribute less to the global climate change as you will be using less air-conditioning to cool those servers.

The author is with Springboard Research.

More Stories on : Convergence | Hardware | Software

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