Virtues of Virtualization
While not an especially new technology, vendors and customers alike are finding more and more uses for virtualisation and the Middle East is beginning to take notice. We look at how far the Middle East has accepted virtualisation, and how far the concept is likely to proliferate over the coming years.
1. Why did it take the Middle East a little longer to wake up to the benefits of virtualisation?
According to an Industry Research in 2013, emerging markets, which include the MENA region, would witness the fastest growth in cloud spending anywhere in the world, collectively growing at 44.1% until 2016.
The UAE cloud market alone is set for a compound annual growth rate of 43.7% until 2016. This means that the share of cloud spending by emerging markets almost double from 13% in 2011 to 24.9% in 2016, which will account for almost 30% of net-new public IT cloud services spending growth, the report stated.
Typically, the Middle East takes a cautious approach for any new technology adoption and this could be attributed to the lack of awareness and shortage of skills. We have generally seen service providers and system integrators acquiring the skills first and then it slowly flows to corporate IT departments.
2. How many CIOs in the region are now comfortable with the concept, and how many are actively virtualising aspects of their infrastructures?
The process of virtualizing applications and especially legacy applications is simple and easy in most cases so CIOs are comfortable in upgrading to this technology. Converting existing server operating system with application in VM files can be deployed as Virtual Servers quickly and effectively incentivizing CIOs to embrace this technology faster.
For example: If you consider a server running a legacy application (which was deployed 10 years ago or more) on an old unsupported OS, where the application vendors are not available any more or the legacy server OS is discontinued by its manufacturer, and the latest hardware does not support this old OS, you can convert this legacy environment from a physical to virtual process fast and deploy it on a new hardware running virtualization technology.
In our view, most corporate IT departments have embraced server virtualization and have embarked on server consolidation projects in the last one or two years. We have also seen increased appetite for our cloud offering compared to the levels one year back. Closely following server virtualization would be Desktop Virtualization but it is yet to pickup in this region. Virtualization in other areas of the infrastructure such as Network and Storage are fairly new and will take some time for the region to adopt.
3. Will more CIOs continue to virtualize various aspects of their infrastructures?
Absolutely, with easy scalability options and cloud computing becoming a fast accepted technology for data management it is the only way forward.
Having tasted success in server virtualization, we would expect to see more and more CIOs willing to virtualize the other areas of their infrastructure such as Desktop, Network, Storage etc.
4. What are the advantages of virtualising?
In a normal physical deployment, one physical server runs a single server operating system utilizing only a small part of its capacity, typically less than 20% (CPU, Memory, Storage). This wastes resources, power, space and money as server hardware is expensive and powerful.
Using virtualization technology, one physical server hosts a number of independent virtual servers distributing the hardware resources amongst them. A physical server can host 10 to 50 or more virtual servers and can consolidate numerous physical server boxes into one.
This technology helps to utilize 100% capacity of the physical server machines by consolidating several servers into one physical server. This leads to tremendous savings in terms of money, power, space and manageability due to fast server deployment and reduced hardware maintenance. Virtual Machines (VMs) are easy to manage (in terms of increase / decrease of hardware resource allocation to VMs) and easy to backup and/or restore (very fast compared to physical servers).
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is another form of Virtualization which enables centrally managed desktops to be delivered to user devices improving security, manageability and costs. This can be on premise or available as a cloud service called DaaS (Desktop as a Service) which can be sourced from cloud service providers through a paid monthly subscription.
A carefully designed and implemented virtualized environment is very stable and highly available. Easy to manage, it can move live VMs to different physical machines without interruption in service.
Similarly network virtualization has several advantages, when it comes to cloud or server virtualization, a Virtual switch would allow the traffic between VMs in a host to be confined to the server itself and not reaching the underlying Layer 2 devices and thus making switching more efficient.
As Network virtualization is evolving, more advanced networking capabilities are added at the hypervisor level by adding additional networking related kernel components. Such advanced network capabilities when combined with Virtual Services such Virtual Firewalls, Virtual Routers, Load Balancers, WAN optimizers etc., Network services can be programmatically deployed for applications within a short span of time.
5. How far across the infrastructure can virtualisation go?
Enterprises in the Middle East have capable infrastructure to take virtualization to the next level and cloud computing is growing in the region. Vendors too are constantly improving and adding features and functionality to their respective virtualization platforms.
Virtualization vendors are creating an ecosystem of Virtualized Services and as technology is evolving, we are seeing more and more participation by infrastructure vendors.
6. Is it likely that most network functions will soon be able to be virtualized? If we get to that stage, is that where we start talking about software--defined networking?
With Next Generation Networks (NGN) being deployed in most Middle East countries and with converged technologies CIOs will talk about software defined networking, which depends on software control of packet forwarding. In a limited way, we're already using software to define the next-generation network, or NGN. What may be missing is a generalized model that supports any network feature through hosted software. It could save a lot in capital costs by substituting servers for proprietary appliances, but it could also create a more agile network, a network better able to respond to market changes and opportunities.
In a limited way, we're already using software to define the networks, a classic example of this will be software based switches used in Hypervisor Virtualization. When we talk about SDN, we are talking about adding a new architecture.
SDN is a network architecture where the control plane is decoupled from the data plane and the hardware from the data plane is generalized to allow more function. SDN allows the Network to be more agile and easy to manage.
Adding automation and configuration of policy based virtual networking services are the real strength of SDN.SDN brings in L2-L7 network services including Routing, Switching, Firewalling, Load Balancing, WAN Accelerator and other advanced Network services, all of which can be programmatically deployed for applications on your existing Physical infrastructure.
7. Do you buy into the notion of "software--defined everything", whereby most of a company's infrastructure is controlled by software?
Software defined everything is very much topical. Software defined datacenter or SDDC is one of the key concepts that will be trending in 2014 in the IT space. SDCC is an interesting idea and many analysts and leading CIO's see it delivering not only much more IT flexibility but also much more agility in an organization's business processes. The key steps in SDCC will be to evolve IT infrastructure into more scalable and manageable resources through the abstraction of servers, storage, networks and applications and making these resources available to users as a service.
Currently we are seeing SDN and SDCC working along with Physical Infrastructure. SDCC is making complex hardware configurations simplified and by consequence makes it more scalable, while increasing performance and reducing provisioning time. In future, as technology evolves, we'll see more progress towards Software defined everything.