3 Growth Phases to Virtualization

  by Kosten Metreweli | 05 Aug 2007 | Permalink | Everything Else

At a recent conference on virtualization, one of the speakers described the current adoption rate for virtualization as “unprecedented in the history of emerging technologies” (John Humphries, IDC, June 07)

IDC then backed-up this claim with some compelling stats:

• Over half of all customers polled have already started using some form of virtualization today (whether client, server, or storage)
• Adoption is particularly strong on the x86 side, where 45% of all server hardware in use will incorporate virtualization within the next 12 months
• Spending on virtualization technology was $600m in ’05 and is growing at a blistering CAGR of over 100%

IDC anticipates this growth will only accelerate, primarily because of the underlying flexibility of virtualisation technology. If today the primary use case is consolidation, new use cases are already evolving and taking hold. IDC foresees the 3 growth phases to virtualization:

• 1.0 – Encapsulation: greater flexibility to move data and isolate applications, ability to consolidate hardware to generate higher utilisation levels (this becoming a mature market today)
• 2.0 – Application mobility: workload balancing, planned downtime, dynamic capacity (this market just beginning to take hold )
• 3.0 – Policy-based automation: enforcement of SLAs through automated capacity flexing, adaptive computing, making computing a variable cost to the business, etc. (growing closer as we approach the next generation data center)

For today’s encapsulation market, the principle driver is the under-utilization of physical hardware. IDC predicts there will be 41m physical servers in use by 2010 (this is 700% increase in 15 years!). But for these 41m servers, the average utilization rate before virtualization can be as low as 10-15%, leaving billions in excess capacity.

With all this unused capacity, the ROI story is simple. 1/2 of every dollar spent on new hardware currently goes toward ongoing power and cooling costs. For every physical machine made redundent, the operational savings is as much as $25,000 per year (even before savings in the new purchases budget).

Another interesting stat: the take-up of virtualization is relatively evenly spread across the enterprise market. Forrester did some segmentation in early 2006 (‘Virtualization goes mainstream’, 2006) and found these response rates for ‘currently using or piloting’:

• Global 2000 – 46%
• Very large – 39%
• Large – 28%
• Medium to large – 25%
• Medium – 25%

As many other blogs have noted, the rapid adoption of virtualization is not without its challenges. Organizations of all sizes struggle with managing the configuration of virtual infrastructure, tracking inventory, and enforcing best practice.

Tideway Foundation 6.3 helps take the pain away from managing virtualization. Foundation tracks the detailed configuration of virtualization technologies across multiple platforms. It also captures the business context by modelling business applications and tracking the virtualized components within application topologies.