BANGALORE, INDIA: VMware, a company synonymous with virtualisation from desktop to data centre, has been consistently proving that virtualisation is far more than a buzz word. The company, in its annual worldwide customer survey, finds that business continuity has risen in importance and this is paving way for higher levels of adoption of virtualisation.

Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, India and SAARC, VMware, says: “Forty two percent of customers worldwide are adopting virtualisation as default build for data centre, up from 25 percent in 2007. Customers also cite manageability and intent to increase number of virtualised business-critical applications as key driver of virtualisation.”

The virtualisation vendor, that acquired additional 550 customers and 230 partners in three years has earmarked $100 million investments for the next two years. The company will soon be launching a series of products aimed at “raising the bar for virtualisation to meet customers needs”, according to Mahabala.

The company has planned a new product, VCloud, for its Cloud strategy – both internal and external, where it will focus on efficiency. Some of the additional feature include 'fault tolerance', which protects applications against hardware failure without a downtime or data loss.

“What a customer thinks of is application availability, security and performance scalability, and he wants a data centre with the lowest TCO. It should also be flexible so that the operating system shouldn't be a problem. So, the requirement is a software platform with a virtual data centre OS, which is like a blanket above the DC resources,” said Mahabala.

"We have also come up with a solution for the desktop dilemma that many face today. Today, people want their personalised desktop to be available on the go for flexible access using multiple devices for business continuity and disaster recovery. They also want legacy Win 32, web applications to work well in such conditions and rich applications interface accessible from anywhere. Whereas, on the other hand, IT requirements differ as they must look into managing disparate desktop images easily, explosions in multiple devices, provide secure and continuous access to desktop and other applications,” he added.

According to Mahabala, with virtualisation, companies can define the needs and set SLAs priority for application for disaster recovery. Apart from running legacy applications on it, the biggest advantage is that companies can test disaster recovery, he said.