Scalability & Security - Big worries for virtual IT?

PUNE, INDIA: Bajaj Auto Ltd has implemented virtualization and reckons it as a smart move when faced with the need of acquiring new physical servers for its data center and facing space constraints at the same time.

VMware implementation is complete and server hardware availability has gone better to 99 per cent and above from earlier scale of 98 per cent. Prima facie, scalability is not an issue, says Raghuvir Singh Sohal, manager-MIS, Bajaj Auto. The feature on online resource management and distributed resource allocation gives good scalability optimization, but still room for improvement exists, specially with the use of one metering to one hardware resource while the platform is spread across multiple hardware.

As he assesses virtualisation’s score on scalability, he gives it a 9.5. “About the extent of 95 per cent, scalability is not an issue, the rest five per cent still a gap, which am sure would be worked upon.” Sohal shares.

Applications consume resources and consolidation rates that denote the number of applications on a single hardware, have further increased, but work is on, answers B S Nagarajan, senior technology consultant, VMware. “In vSphere TM4, a lot of attention has been paid to scalability.”

As to the good-old security alarm bells that have been ringing in general for virtualization, he says that no issues exist with customers as of now, but as a vendor, they are still being cautious. “We are proactively working on that. Because as virtualization keeps becoming popular, it is definitely possible to be an attractive target for hackers.”

He adds that the company is taking the worry seriously and working on towards security related patches. It has started sharing APIs with security specialists and solutions would be coming out of that in 2009. For Bajaj Auto’s Sohal, this is a good news though, as of now, he hasn’t faced any security related problems yet.