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Desktops: the next frontier
Despite being a new entrant in the virtualization arena, desktop virtualization is fast gaining traction, especially in the Business Process Outsourcing industry.
The virtualization juggernaut rolls on. After storage and servers, virtualization has set its sights on storming yet another bastion of high costs and avoidable waste in the IT organization—desktops. Syed Rizwan, DGM, IT, Siemens Information Processing Services (SIPS), a leading provider of BPO services, is betting on desktop virtualization to manage his PC fleet, and bring under control the twin problems that had been plaguing him for a while—underutilization of desktops and high maintenance costs. 
Desktop virtualization essentially involves centralizing applications at the data center making management and provisioning easy. According to Gartner, desktop virtualization could outpace server virtualization in the coming years.
The ubiquity of the desktop environment means desktop virtualization technology is not restricted to any particular vertical. However, in India, as the SIPS example hints, the BPO industry seems to be in the first adopter mode, with many companies either evaluating or adopting the technology.
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Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Intelenet Global Services
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“There are some BPOs which are carrying out proof-of-concept on this technology. We are in talks with major players in the desktop virtualization space like HP,” revealed Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Intelenet Global Services, a BPO organization headquartered in Mumbai. Anwer Bagdadi, Senior Vice-president and CTO of CFC India Services, another Mumbai-based BPO, acknowledges that there is a definite need for desktop virtualization. “We are currently in the stage of server and storage consolidation and virtualization. Going forward, we would graduate to desktop virtualization,” he said.
Typically, BPO units in India operate at night. As a result, daytime finds most of the desktop systems idle. Dedicated desktops are not exactly cheap, hence hosting applications at a centralized location can provide more efficient use of resources and improve overall manageability and control.
“We have conducted studies that provide up to 80 percent better utilization of resources,” said Jim Lenox, Director, Asia South, VMware, a leading player in the virtualization software space.
With well-connected servers, enterprises could have a better plan for data recovery, mobility and flexibility using a virtualized desktop environment. Management issues like reconnecting user from machine to machine, monitoring the health of the systems, maintenance of administrative software, and BIOS updates are automatically taken care of.
Maintenance panacea
As security threats like virus, malware and spyware add to their woes, desktop maintenance has become a major headache for IT organizations.
“Desktop virtualization can help create a more secure and centralized environment. It takes all the controls and brings it under one umbrella,” said Deshpande.
For example, if an organization has 500 desktops with one maintenance engineer dedicated for 100 desktops, it would require five such engineers. When all these desktops are moved to a virtualized environment centrally, only one engineer would be required for server maintenance at the backend, thereby saving labor costs.
Desktop virtualization also promises to bring down power consumption. Industry reports indicate that system power consumption of an idle enterprise desktop varies anywhere between 40 and 80 watts. If an enterprise has 100 desktops, the power consumed would be in the range of 4,000-8,000 watts.
“Desktop virtualization can reduce power consumption by at least 25 percent,” said UK-based Paul Dunford, Director of Channel and Alliances, ClearCube Technology, while speaking to Network Computing over phone. In the aforementioned example, this would translate into a power consumption of 1,000 to 2,000 watts. Thus, apart from lowering power consumption, enterprises can also reduce electricity bills.
According to Arun Rao, Business Manager, Client Virtualization, Personal Systems Group, HP India, “The savings on each virtualized desktop over a period of five years would be around Rs 50,000,” That amounts to Rs 50 lakh for 100 virtualized desktops during the same period.
Desktop virtualization also enhances information security. Both IT users and vendors agree that security policies can be easily managed as the control is moved from the desktop and placed on a centralized location.
“There are processes in place that encrypt the data stream from the virtualized desktop to the data center, so even if there is a sniffer around to decode and analyze data packets, all it would manage to get is garbage,” said Ajit Achar, Senior Architect, Software Practice, Sun Microsystems.
Vendors opine that hardware obsolescence too can be tackled through this technology. Devices like hard drives, optical disks and fans have physical movements that make them prone to failures. The mean time between failures (MTBF) of such machines is around 4-5 years. On the other hand, a virtualized desktop would have MTBF of 10-20 years.
“One virtualized desktop buying cycle is equal to two normal desktop buying cycles, so with desktop virtualization there would definitely be savings on the second buying cycle,” said HP’s Rao.
Options play
Enterprises can choose from one the various methods available for virtualizing their desktop environment. In a server-based computing approach, the desktop has a virtualization layer installed as an application and connects to the server hosted at the back-end for device support and physical resource management. In this scenario, the ratio of user and machine is many : one.
On the other hand, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) method, the virtual desktop on the client side connects to the server that is broken into multiple virtual machines (VMs). A group of users would therefore connect from the desktop to one of the VMs. Each operating system (OS) can have a customized usage to provide flexibility. The ratio in this case is few users to a single machine. VMware, Xen source and Virtual Iron operate in this space.
Client Consolidation Infrastructure (CCI) is yet another option. In this case, the back-end will have blade PC architecture. When the virtualized client connects to the back-end there is dynamic allocation of resources and it gives one : one computing.
“CCI gives the best performance. VDI’s and CCI’s cost of implementation would be around the same, and would make sense for large enterprises,” said Rao.
At the hardware end there are two options—either virtualize on the server blade or on the PC blade. PC blade virtualization is easy to configure.
“PC blades can be redefined as the user requirement changes, so you could assign four users per blade or 16 users per blade as per your requirements,” said Dunford.
The advantages of PC blades include lower administrative, operational and maintenance resource demands; space savings at the workstation; ease of adding and relocating end users; reduction of workstation noise caused by fans and hard drives, and work area heat generation; sharing of certain accessories like uninterruptible power supplies; and improved physical security by placing critical hardware in a central, locked location.
Server blade virtualization has some limitations. One must take into consideration the number of users who need to be supported by the hardware. Also, it is important to look at the input/output between the device and the network.
It is up to IT heads to decide on the number of desktops that need to be moved to the virtualized environment and those that should to be kept as fat clients. Industry experts opine that enterprises can choose to virtualize 100 percent of their client devices, but for clients that require local applications, fat clients would be required.
The other side
For Intelenet’s Deshpande, the key point of contention with vendors is Return on Investment (RoI). He also wants to know how this technology is implemented in a captive versus non-captive call center because a third-party BPO would have segregated IT environments. Any implementation therefore needs to factor in the RoI. “I don’t think desktop virtualization will be applicable to all organizations as a plain vanilla solution,” he said.
According to Gartner, desktop virtualization is not yet ready for deployment. Except for having a common image of the OS, it has not penetrated the industry.
“Licensing is a barrier to desktop virtualization. Microsoft has not come up with a policy on this technology,” said Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Client Computing Group, Gartner.
Windows Vista Enterprise edition allows users to have four installations of Windows in virtual machines (VMs), and they can also install and use Vista Business Edition in a VM.
“We are making changes that will enable enterprises to have an effective desktop virtualization in place and will ensure that their expected benefits pan out in production,” said Rishi Srivastava, Director, Windows Client Business Group, Microsoft India.
However, an analyst from the Burton Group noted that though Microsoft's virtual hard disk (VHD) format is open, it disallows other vendors from using it because if VHD runs on any another platform the software major will not be able to control the licensing of that application.
 | Anwer Bagdadi, Senior
Vice-president & CTO,
CFC India Services |
Bagdadi hopes that such issues would be taken care of in a few months time. But he feels that enterprises should focus more on the standardization of storage and server consolidation processes before they take a leap toward desktop virtualization. “Storage and server consolidation would ease desktop virtualization as you have already consolidated various servers for applications, files, print, domain etc,” said Bagdadi.
The servers are surrounded by various security policies. Using this policy IT can segregate users and provide access as per defined policies. Similarly, storage consolidation would take away the risk of failure of storage as there would already be an existing backup provision in place.
“Customers need to tell vendors to carry a proof-of-concept at the customers end and test all their applications,” said Achar.
Beyond BPO
Other verticals like manufacturing and healthcare are also waking up to the potential of desktop virtualization.
“We are closely watching this space and will take a decision in the coming months,” said Sanjeev Kumar, Country Head, IT, Philips Electronics India. He explained that load balancing on the server, continuous data availability, and the speed at which business applications can be delivered are the key factors that need to be looked at before going in for an implementation.
“In the next two years there would be a lot of demand for this technology. Expect a few modifications in the next eight months from us as well as other vendors,” said Achar.
Case Study
The scene at Siemens Information Processing Services (SIPS)
To keep the cost of operations low, increase output, and improve the utilization and efficiency of its desktop environment, SIPS decided to opt for a virtualized desktop environment in April this year. For this process it chose Microsoft’s SoftGrid Application Virtualization solution.
Specific applications are assigned to specific agents as per their respective shifts on virtualized desktops. The centralized host releases applications as per the requirement for that particular shift.
“We started off with a pilot project that lasted for two weeks as we tested some of our business processes by hosting applications on a centralized server,” said Syed Rizwan, DGM, IT, SIPS.
SIPS operates out of five facilities in Chennai and Bangalore with a workforce of around 2,300 people. The company provides back-office services in the areas of finance and accounting, transactions, processing and customer contact services to Siemens companies, customers and partners across the world.
The company believes that the implementation of desktop virtualization will reduce the savings on facility and infrastructure by 50 percent. As per reports, the spending on infrastructure facilities costs around $7,000 per agent per year. With 50 percent savings this translates into $3,500 retained by the company.
“In another 6-8 months we should be able to calculate the RoI on this technology,” said Rizwan. Presently, SIPS is carrying out implementation on 400 hundred desktops—200 each in the cities of Bangalore and Chennai.
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