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Souma Das,
Area Vice President,
Citrix Systems India
How big is the virtualization market globally and in India?
Virtualization has become one of the most talked-about technologies in recent years because it breaks the “hard-coded” link between hardware and software, allowing individual computing components to be dynamically combined and reassembled for maximum efficiency and agility. Citrix has long been the leading provider of virtualization technologies at the user tier of computing with products that deliver mission-critical applications to end users with the best performance, security and cost savings.
IDC analyst John Humphreys predicts that an already strong virtualization software market will expand to more than US$1.8 billion in 2009. The market stands at about $810 million today, up 46 percent from $560 million in 2005.
Xen brought in about $15.6 million in 2005, up from $12.4 million in 2004, and accounts for about 3 percent of the market.
The use of virtualization in the logic and data tier of applications improves overall customer value and enhances Citrix’s position as the market leader in end-to-end application delivery infrastructure.
Today Citrix is a key provider of server, desktop and application virtualization technologies, a market which IDC expects to be worth in excess of $3.4 billion by 2011,” said John Humphreys, program vice president, IDC. Citrix’s new end-to-end virtualization offerings augment the company’s application delivery strategy and represent the foundational components of the future application delivery environment.
Can you define some of the trends in this segment?
The changing business climate requires the IT operations group to focus more on delivering application services to the business. The latest trend sees IT operations managers shifting their focus from tactical technical issues like CPU utilization and instead focusing on building broader architectural flexibility and redundancy into their application delivery infrastructure — all with higher data security.
There is a drastic improvement on business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. As the business becomes more reliant on IT to run day-to-day activities, IT must be equipped to handle any workforce disruption. According to a Forrester Consulting report 82% of surveyed server operations directors reported that improving business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) preparedness is an important initiative — making it the No. 1 priority for 2007.
There is huge focus on the security of the data. In today’s environments, most security threats are sophisticated, focused attacks with business data as the primary target. Since applications are the main conduit to sensitive data, they are increasingly the focus of these attacks. The most prominent trend observed today is that IT operations managers are now more focussed on designing a secure server architecture that protects the applications and data that reside on their servers.
Another important trend observed is to enhance server utilization through consolidation and virtualization. The relationship between applications and servers is in transition. IT infrastructure managers, who once tightly coupled applications to server resources, are now spending their time on server consolidation and virtualization efforts. This result’s in lowering the operational costs associated with server farms, while also laying the foundation for BC/DR initiatives.
Reduction in support costs and improvement in application performance monitoring is also a key trend today. As applications increase in complexity, so do the costs of server support and monitoring. IT directors cite decreasing server support costs and improving end-to-end application performance monitoring as an important 2008 initiative.
Who will be its early adopters?
Virtualization is on the cusp of breaking into the broader mainstream market, having proven its worth for many early adopters. The early adopters of application virtualization are mainly IT oriented organizations who understand the need for early adoption of this technology to enhance their productivity in the long run.
If you ask one of the early adopters of virtualization technologies what prompted them to adopt the technology, it is quite likely that you will find reasons like resource utilization and better manageability at the top. Application virtualization is many more things than just that. The decision makers: The network architectures who understand the benefits of application virtualization and prioritize application security and business continuity are mainly the early adopters of this technology.
It is critical to understand that the changing business climate requires more responsive networks. In turn, as network architects are evolving to become more responsive — and adopt higher-levels of application responsibility — they need to address new requirements like securing application and combating evolved network threats. Other concern areas for network architects include, improving business continuity, focussing on application performance, especially for Web applications and making application easily accessible from any location.
What are the pain points at present?
The “low-hanging fruit” of server virtualization was initially server consolidation. Infrastructure servers have been severely overprovisioned, die to the desire to provide suitable headroom for peak performance, coupled with the fact that many applications – especially Windows server applications – are more stable and reliable when deployed one per server. But virtualization also introduced its own pain points: when consolidating one physical server with multiple workloads, single points of failure are introduced, and the number and complexity of managed systems potentially goes up, not down – especially when factoring in the complexity of the storage configurations used in virtual infrastructure.
How are they being addressed?
By introducing a unified management tool called XenCenter in the XenServer offering, Citrix has simplified the management of virtual environments, making it possible to manage physical and virtual servers and the storage and networks they use from a single intuitive interface. Ironically, the same technology that introduces potential single points of failure also makes them much simpler to address, since each virtual machine can be replicated or relocated easily, providing a basis for disaster recovery. (This also makes provisioning new virtual servers extremely efficient, enabling organizations to spin up new servers in minutes.)
IT, in fact is still a touchy subject in India. In cases where people are reluctant to outsource important technologies/applications, why do you think they would embrace virtualization, essentially with regards to privacy issues?
IT definitely is a touchy subject in India but this is changing at a rapid pace. The early adopters of application virtualization are mainly IT oriented organizations who understand the need for early adoption of this technology to enhance their productivity in the long run. This has in turn; also made other organizations to sit back and notice the benefits of this technology.
With more and more Network architects understanding the benefits of application virtualization and prioritizing application security and business continuity; and more and more CIO’s prioritizing business processes optimization and IT’s responsiveness, people are becoming more open to adopting new technology.
Enterprises in India have matured to the extent of consolidating their IT infrastructure acquired over the years. Cost pressures are forcing large enterprises to evaluate and closely assess the utilization and productivity of these IT assets. At the same time, as business has become more dependent on IT, organizational goals have started to get linked to the IT roadmap of the enterprise more intimately than ever before.
2007 has witnessed Indian enterprises graduate to the second level of Dynamic IT infrastructure – where IT infrastructure would be able to effect changes instantaneously and dynamically in response to the changing business scenario. The key technology components that would come to the fore to attain this state would be virtualization, SOA and application integration.
It is critical to understand that the changing business climate requires more responsive networks. In turn, as network architects are evolving to become more responsive — and adopt higher-levels of application responsibility — they need to address new requirements like securing application and combating evolved network threats. Other concern areas for network architects include, improving business continuity, focussing on application performance, especially for Web applications and making application easily accessible from any location.
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