Virtualization and server manufacturers are like two different
species working together to share a symbiotic relationship.
It’s not a tussle, unlike what may apparently seem to be.
While virtualization has impacted the server market, it has created
newer opportunities and brought about a paradigm shift in the way
server manufacturers calculate their ROI.
Server virtualization has turned the ROI calculator on its head.
“The current trend among server manufacturers is to focus on
revenue rather than on the number of server units sold,” says
Sandeep Deshmukh, Head, Professional and Managed services,
Persistent Systems.
The current trend among server manufacturers is to focus on
revenue rather than on the number of server units sold,"
- Sandeep Deshmukh, Head, Professional and Managed services,
Persistent Systems
Virtualization has created newer opportunities for server
manufacturers. According to Gartner, in October 2009, only 16
percent of server workloads were running on virtual machines, but
the numbers would rise to approximately 50 percent of workloads
(x86 architecture) by the end of 2012 or about 58 million deployed
machines. Research firm IDC expects virtualization to open up a USD
60 billion server market in 2010 in which blade will be an
important part of this segment as blade servers are virtualized
twice as often as non-bladed. In Q4 of FY’10, the blade
server market grew by 30 percent. “Clearly, virtualization is
driving a trend towards blade servers because they are
customizable,” adds Deshmukh.
"Virtualization means that fewer servers get deployed but
the ones that do are typically much more powerful systems"
- Paul Prince, CTO, Enterprise Product Group, Dell
Virtualization has also resulted in an increase in demand for
higher-end systems. “The demand for IT solutions in
businesses continues to increase and with this comes a requirement
for more computing capability, which in turn drives more
demand,” says Paul Prince, CTO, Enterprise Product Group,
Dell.
Virtualization increases the demand for high-capacity
servers and gives vendors the opportunity to position newer
servers”
- Subram Natrajan, Director of Systems Solutions Center, Systems
and Technology Group, IBM India/SA
Agrees Subram Natrajan, Director of Systems Solutions Center,
Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/SA, “Virtualization
increases the demand for high-capacity servers that are more
reliable and efficient, which gives vendors the opportunity to
position newer servers.” Given the
requirement for more computing capability, virtualization is
driving the demand for more robustly configured and powerful
servers, which typically have higher price points. “This is
largely due to the need for more CPU bandwidth and memory to
execute and drive the benefits of a virtualized server. The impact
this trend has on purchasing decisions means that fewer servers get
deployed but the ones that do are typically much more powerful
systems,” says
Prince.
Virtualization may incrementally reduce the number of servers
required in a data center, but it is actually enabling better
resource usage of servers. “Server resources that have been
traditionally under-utilized have now been repurposed for bigger
and better activities in the data centers. There are instances of
data center utilization running at very low levels, such as 20-30
percent which used to be a common practice. However, the advent of
virtualization has driven up utilization levels significantly, even
as high as 30-50 percent in some instances, from the earlier
recorded levels. I think virtualization is a complementary
technology to the server market,” says Venkat Thummisi,
Director,
Cognizant.
With virtualization taking the center stage, server manufacturers
are already moving in the right direction in leveraging
virtualization and making it a mainstream feature of their
products. “Virtualization is driving the behaviour of
enterprise customers and product vendors alike in terms of
development and management of infrastructure components. We are
seeing a trend towards the integration of server, storage and
networking products in an effort to enable customers to address the
complexity of data center management in a better manner,”
says
Thummisi.
To make full use of virtualization technologies, many companies are
partnering with each other and coming up with combined offerings.
For example last year, Cisco, EMC and VMware announced a joint
partnership called the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition
(VCE) with the key objective of accelerating customer migration to
virtualization and cloud infrastructures. “Server
manufacturers should come up with strategies for combined solution
for server (blade), network and virtual storage. They should work
towards having built-in functionalities to take care of hardware
redundancy at each level (blade, network and storage) and thereby
build more energy efficient systems,” says Deshmukh of
Persistent Systems.