In the current economic situation, as organizations across the globe grapple with plummeting sales, they are trying to squeeze the maximum out of every investment. Not surprisingly then, CIOs are also looking at technologies such as virtualization to solve their IT spending woes. Most CIOs we spoke to were impressed by the concept of virtualization, and have either implemented it in some form or are looking to do so in the near future. The technology, which was initially looked at to optimize underutilized servers, has today turned into heavy artillery in the arsenal of CIOs for consolidating servers, storage and networks. Every CIO today is chanting the virtualization mantra because it has translated into significant reduction in costs.

Take for example Religare Securities, a leading equities and research firm. The company has saved Rs 1 crore in server hardware and acquisition costs—in addition to gaining the capability to increase the average CPU utilization from 25-30 percent to 60-70 percent—by using VMware. Similarly, there are other companies such as Reliance Capital, ICICI Bank, Mahindra & Mahindra and Kansai Nerolac which have successfully used the power of virtualization to cut costs while boosting efficiency.

Low Adoption
Yet, while every company realizes the power of virtualization, few Indian organizations have been able to successfully implement it and gain from it. Naveen Mishra, senior research analyst at Gartner, says that globally only 12 percent of the total server population is virtualized, while in India the adoption rate is much lower. “It will take around 2-3 years before virtualization goes mainstream in the country,” predicts Mishra.
India can currently be considered an emerging market for virtualization solutions when compared to other markets across the globe. Notes Koushik Ramani, associate director for infrastructure management and tech support at MindTree, “The level of virtualization in India is still at an 80:20 ratio for non-production vs production against the global ratio of 30:70.”

Ramani believes this is because Indian organizations have traditionally been followers, and they are extremely cautious in adopting newer technologies for business-critical operations. Lee Ann Tan, general manager, data center and solutions group, Datacraft, puts forth a similar point of view by explaining that Asia Pacific is currently lagging behind mature economies where virtualization has started to become common in the production data center.

While the awareness level has certainly increased among CIOs, it’s still not at a stage where it can be considered mainstream. Vamsi Krishna, senior technical manager, AMD India, articulates the evolution of the adoption of virtualization in the country: “2004 saw organizations looking at proof of concepts (POCs) of virtualization. From POCs they moved on to experimenting with virtualization solutions, and today they are looking at implementing these solutions.”

VMware, one of the leading virtualization solutions providers, has seen an interesting trend across its customer segment. “Customers tend to follow the pattern of explore, expand and then standardize,” states Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, India and Saarc, VMware. “Since virtualization is a transformation of computing infrastructure, we advise that the implementation be done in phases, architected and designed as any other infrastructure solution. Some of our customers have reached the third phase, and many more are into their expansion phase or standardization phase, which means more opportunities for us in addition to the rapidly growing number of new customers joining the virtualization journey.”