SERVER virtualisation, an esoteric technology that was once familiar only to mainframe system managers, could be on the cusp of ubiquity.
The tripling in the value of VMware's initial public offering (IPO) in the New York Stock Exchange is one telling indication. Since its IPO at US$29 per share on Aug 14, stock prices have surged past US$90 last week.
VMware, a subsidiary of storage giant EMC, is a leading vendor of server virtualisation solutions targeted at businesses which want to improve the utilisation rates and efficiency of their Intel-based - so called x86 - servers and computers. Other key vendors in this market segment include Red Hat, XenSource and Microsoft.
"Virtualisation is mainstream now, and it will soon be universal. But virtualisation as a deployed technology is still very young,"
Raghu Raghuram, vice-president of products and solutions for VMware, said in an interview with BizIT. "Only between 5 to 20 per cent of organisations worldwide are using it now, so the potential of this technology is massive. We think that virtualisation is going to transform the market."
Further fuelling the take-up of virtualisation, he said, will be the broadening of this technology's scope in diverse business environments.
He said: "It used to be that virtualisation was only about making the server more efficient, but the list of benefits and usage is now much broader."
For instance, he said, 55 per cent of VMware customers now use virtualisation for disaster recovery, while 60 per cent use it to make their IT environments 'more dynamic'. By that, he means the use of VMotion, a VMware product that lets IT managers create and move virtual application environments across disparate hardware realms without interrupting application usage.
Another budding virtualisation trend, he said, is using it to bolster security and improve manageability of desktop and laptop computers. By creating virtual desktop operating systems spawned from centrally-networked servers, businesses improve the manageability and security of their desktop and remote applications. This trend will become important, he said, as outsourcing becomes more pervasive, which adds to the pressure of central IT control.
In Asia, adoption of virtualisation lags behind that of US but the trend is a growing robustly, said Avneesh Saxena, vice-president for IDC's Asia-Pacific systems, storage and software research.
"Uptake of server virtualisation in Asia isn't very high yet. From a recent IDC Asia Pacific end user survey, 69% of respondents said they do not currently have virtualised servers," Mr Saxena told BizIT.
"In terms of penetration, I feel approximately15 to 20 per cent of the servers in Asia-Pacific should be virtualised today with mature markets like Australia and Singapore being higher than the emerging and growing markets like India and China."
By comparison, the adoption rates for server virtualisation in the US stands around 25-30 per cent and ramping up very quickly, he said.
Added Mr Saxena: "We expect more uptake of server virtualisation in the next 12 to 24 months in the Asia-Pacific. The appeal of this technology will be cost savings that can be realised from improving server utilisation. For example, if you have 100 servers not running at full capacity and you virtualise a portion, say 20 servers, you effectively save on not having to buy that many more servers as workload increases."
He added that the 'visibility index' of this technology has gone up in this region, with more organisations in mature markets looking at how quickly they can adopt server virtualisation within their environment.
He expects adoption rates in Asia Pacific to increase from the current 15-20 per cent to more than 40 per cent over the next four years.
The benefits of going virtual
VIRTUALISATION is a technology that lets users create concurrently running, multiple copies of the operating environment - in the same computer. For instance, a computer can have Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems running at the same time.
Inside each environment, known as 'virtual machine' or VM, applications operate as if they are the only ones using the computer, oblivious to other VMs. VMs can also be easily spawned and moved across different hardware, making it possible to quickly ramp computing resources in times of need. The business benefits of doing so are manifold. Firstly, hardware utilisation rises.
"Most computers in business organisations run at a 10 per cent utilisation rate. With virtualisation, this increases to 50-60 per cent, or a five-fold increase in capital savings," said Raghu Raghuram, vice-president of products and solutions for VMware.
Improving hardware utilisation also drives down power usage - a significant area of spending for many businesses today. He cited the example of VMware customer Darwin City Council in Australia, which used the technology to reduce its computing requirements from 13 to three servers, saving AU$30,000 (S$39,700) over three years on electricity.
