The Hindu Business Line : Do more with less...

Talk of doing more with less and the term that pops up is ‘Virtualisation.’ eWorld chatted with Ganesh Mahabala, Regional Director of VMware India and Saarc, to understand the concept better. VMware is one of the largest providers of virtualisation software and solutions.

Over to Mahabala:

Put simply, what is virtualisation?

Virtualisation is software technology that is transforming the IT landscape and essentially changing the way people operate.

The powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run only one single operating system. Virtualisation, on the other hand, breaks this format and helps in running multiple operating systems and applications on the same computer.

Virtualisation can benefit anyone who uses the computer — from IT professionals, Mac users, to commercial businesses and government organisations. This technology helps in saving time, money and energy with the existing computer hardware resources

Be it servers, desktops or data centres, there is some sort of virtualisation taking place, right? What are the key trends in this area?

Undoubtedly, the potential of virtualisation in the India growth story is huge. Virtualisation will play a pivotal role in 2008 as it gains wide-scale adoption. The IT/ITES segments, in India, have been early adopters of consolidation and virtualisation. In addition to ease of management and better resource utilisation, enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of additional benefits such as design densities, power and cooling.

Riding on the success of server virtualisation, storage virtualisation is also coming of age in India. The success stories of virtualisation have started having positive impact on all segments of industry — manufacturing, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), retail, aviation, oil and gas, education, government. In fact, across all industries.

Will virtualisation bring down overall costs on hardware?

It works two ways. Yes and no. Virtualisation spans both desktops and servers and where customers are working on servers, through virtualisation, it helps free up server space and thereby adds to the processing capability.

Most of the older servers run on different architecture and have single or dual core processors.

The current day processors that run servers vary from dual core to quad core and may even go to six to eight core ones.

In such a situation, most original equipment manufacturers look to work with virtualisation providers in helping their customers virtualise their systems, freeing up space with fewer systems and also saving on power consumption in data centres.

This does not mean new servers will not be bought. Users will buy new ones for their storage and processing capabilities. The best part of virtualisation is it helps replicate the system and thereby helps businesses run multiple applications.

As companies move to new multi-core servers, they will be able to work on a lot more applications with less number of servers. This will become more popular as enterprises seek to offer services on demand.

The early adopters of virtualisation are companies in IT and IT enabled services, followed by those in the financial services, telecom companies; every other sector will see the benefits of virtualisation. Some of the companies using virtualisation in different sectors include Chitale Dairy, HPCL, Halifax Financials, I2Technologies … the list goes on.

How are you looking to make things better for your customers?

Customers today don’t want to deal with complexities of managing disparate moving parts.

They don’t want to spend time building complex bridges between things that don’t talk to each other. They want an easy-to-use plug-and-play data centre.

Here are a few reasons why one should go in for virtualisation-:

Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimisation is achieved as virtualisation helps pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model.

With virtualisation, one can reduce the physical infrastructure cost, the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data centre.

This leads to reductions in real-estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.

Virtualisation offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance.

One can deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that end users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC, which improves desktop manageability.

Virtual infrastructure solutions are ideal for production environments because they run on industry-standard servers and desktops and support a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure.

VMware has designed its solutions to function independently of the hardware and operating system to provide customers with a broad platform choice.

Abour your R&D operations…

We announced our multi-year initiative to expand India-based research and development (R&D) operations in March 2008.

We already have a strong presence across India with offices in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai.

We plan to invest $100 million in India by 2010 with a new development centre in Bangalore.

We also foresee doubling the India-based engineering organisation to more than 1,000 people in the next two years.

The new Bangalore development centre has expanded on the existing R&D operations in Bangalore and Pune.

The centre supports research and development programmes across the company’s entire portfolio of solutions for data centre and desktop virtualisation. The new centre includes a 4,000-sq.ft computer lab.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in