Virtualisation, the first step to cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: Studies point out that a mere 10-15 per cent of the market is virtualised and also that India as a market is not so aggressive in terms of cloud adoption. However, A L Jagannath, director - marketing, VMware India and Balaji Rao, regional manager, West & North India, VMware India seem to be very optimistic that both virtualisation and cloud adoption are going to see a 'C-Change' this year, which marks the first wherein virtual server deployment was ahead than its physical counterpart.

Also Read: C-Change 2011: Cloud is a paradigm shift

They were talking to CIOL on the sidelines of a session, 'Accelerating the journey to your cloud', during the second day of the C-Change 2011 held here. Excerpts:

CIOL: Why does an enterprise have to move from virtualisation to cloud?

Jagannath: Cloud is an approach on how to use an application platform better and virtualisation is the first step towards the journey to cloud. It is a three-stage approach and you get various benefits in all the three stages.

In the first stage, IT production, such as files, server, get the basic virtualisation, which in turn gives out high RoI in the form of server consolidation, less manpower cost, low power and cooling cost, less data centre footprint, etc.

In the next stage, that is business production, a company can get unprecedented reliability, with robust RoI for applications, which is mission critical for any business.

The third stage, which is IT-as-a-Service or private cloud, optimises IT and business infrastructure and gives agility, manageability, high compute capacity, etc. Data centre management, which was very complicated before, becomes much easier then.

It is a myth that people have to junk their existing hardware and then move to cloud. With cloud you are able to utilise the virtualised infrastructure much better.

Virtualisation sets the tone towards cloud. The adoption, though very low as of now, however, can't be termed as slow because people were in fact waiting and watching the technology to mature.

Today, CIOs are realising the benefits of virtualisation, and that too within three months of deployment. Thus, virtualisation has become a core strategic investment today.

CIOL: What is the next frontier that VMware is looking at?

Balaji: Along with application and security, we are looking at the complete nine yards of cloud.

With the recent acquisitions, such as of Neoaccel, Springsource, Rabid and others we are looking at manageability, security, application development, infrastructure layer and desktop layer on top for cloud.

We also have high performance servers, such as AppServer, WebServer, built especially for cloud, and IT Help Desk to make the journey from virtualisation to cloud secure and easy.

CIOL: What are the current trends that you see in the Indian market?

Balaji: The percentage of virtualisation deployment is increasing. This year the number of virtual machines have overtaken physical servers. We will also see an increased adoption of cloud, especially private cloud, towards the end of the year. Hybrid cloud will be more realistic as compared to public cloud in India.

People have also started evaluating application platform development and virtualisation so that it becomes portable to cloud once they make the decision to move to it. With the proliferation of high-end mobile devices, end point or desktop virtualisation can become a trend in India.