The next OS

Chris Norton, regional manager at VMware in South Africa, even went as far as to say that the benefits of virtualisation have become so clear that five years from now, operating systems will be obsolete. "Today, customers are using VMware virtualistion in new and exciting ways, moving far beyond desktop and server consolidation to fully automate their IT infrastructure. Now, IT is entering the next major transformation: to cloud computing, which potentially can deliver order-of-magnitude gains in IT flexibility, agility, and cost-efficiency," he explained.

"As virtualisation becomes pervasive, a common infrastructure is being laid across data centres and bridging corporate boundaries that will enable resources on premise and off-premise to be combined securely into a single compute cloud. This infrastructure enables companies to liberate themselves from the constraints imposed by physical data centres, and run their businesses without the huge costs associated with over-provisioning resources for peak demands, failover, or disaster recovery," Norton said.

THE FUTURE IS HERE

These business benefits are already being seen by companies that have implemented virtualisation technologies. Andrew Geere, CIO at Alexander Forbes" rel=tag>Alexander Forbes, in presenting a case study explaining the company`s virtualisation implementation, pointed out that technology is no longer a bottleneck for bringing Alexander Forbes` products, or its clients` products, to market. "Technology is critical to running our environment efficiently, and in order to do more with our available budget, we had to look at virtualisation as an option," he said. "Introducing new technology into the existing environment can be scary, but the benefits - giving leverage for extra space and giving us an environment to run innovation, outweighed the risks."

Similarly, Peter Armstrong, corporate strategist at BMC Software, pointed out that by adopting virtualisation, BMC has become more efficient in its delivery of business services. "For example, we have reclaimed three years of data centre capacity, and will avoid spending as much as $10 million this year to support our planned business growth," he said. "Within 12 months of implementation, we now have 25% fewer servers and 20% more capacity. Within 24 months we will have 50% fewer servers, and we are already saving $420 000 annually, just in power and cooling. We already emit 5 300 tons less CO2 each year as a direct result."

GOING GREEN

Energy savings and eco-friendliness are virtualisation`s biggest benefit. Stefan Jacobs, SEE Systems Practice Solution Architect at Sun Microsystems, asked delegates at the event whether computing is sustainable, reaching the conclusion that it`s not. The reasons: "We need energy and natural resources to make the products, we need electricity to run them, and we use up energy and create waste when we recycle and dispose of them."

This theme was carried throughout the conference, with all of the speakers pointing out virtualisation`s energy saving advantages. Jacobs pointed out that IT companies and suppliers need to come up with ways to deal with the high energy consumption of computing devices, and that "there needs to be an IT tradition to use less power".

The consensus reached was that consolidation and virtualisation are a necessity for the future - in terms of reducing energy usage as well as resolving other common issues found today in data centres. Norton pointed out that the number of servers is increasing by 10% to 12% annually, and that maintaining server infrastructures can consume 65% of IT budgets. "In addition, server utilisation is going down - it`s now at just 6% as an average - and management costs are rising faster than hardware costs are falling," he said.

Jacobs added that power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005 and is on track to double again by 2010. "The network consumes more than 100 billion kilowatts of electricity - which costs organisations over $7.2 billion annually," he said. "Over 60% of data centres are running out of power, cooling and/or space and power density is rising - 1990 cooling techniques are becoming obsolete."

THE SOLUTION

Niall Kritzinger, VMware territory manager, SA, explained: "Essentially, virtualisation is about consolidation - it is meant to fix and solve solution problems. It addresses desktop management, software lifecycle management, provisioning, resource management, service-level management, change management, application availability, and return on investment and total cost of ownership."

The higher the server consolidation ratio, the higher the ROI will be. Kritzinger said that 65:1 is the highest VMware has seen in production, while 50:1 is the reality. However, he pointed out that most companies do not feel comfortable with more than a 5:1 virtualisation ratio. "The worst we have ever done is a 2:1, but that still means a lot of costs and power consumptions are halved," he said.

Johann van der Merwe, manager and service line leader: Infrastructure and Operations Security: Security & Privacy Services, Deloitte, made the case that while the concept of virtualisation is old, the way it is being applied is ground-breaking.

Norton`s presentation made this case, underlying the technology`s impact on the future of cloud computing. "With virtualisation as their underlying architecture, companies are liberated from physical resource constraints and can radically transform the economics of IT. As new innovations come forth from VMware and the virtualisation ecosystem, they will expand the virtual platform to enable cloud computing on each company`s own terms," he said.