Shailesh Agarwal, country manager, Storage, IBM India and South Asia speaks on the importance of server virtualisation for India and how CIOs can utilise the technology to overcome the ever growing challenges within their datacentres.

How is server virtualisation gaining traction in India?

A recent study by Info-Tech shows that businesses adopting virtualisation realise a 40 - 75% reduction in hardware acquisition costs and monthly recurring savings in hardware maintenance costs of 25 - 50%. With numbers like those, the research firm believes cost conscious IT departments will be forced to consider virtualisation in the coming year.

Server virtualisation is already gaining traction rapidly in Asia Pacific. Indian businesses of all sizes can reduce power consumption and carbon emissions in the datacentre by redesigning building architectures to be more efficient, and using virtualisation and consolidation. Yes, virtualisation is picking up in India and will grow more rapidly in the SME sector in the years to come. It will help in increased application flexibility, increased server manageability and application continuity and disaster recovery.

What is the general architecture followed by enterprises while going in for server virtualisation?

Virtualisation is most commonly applied to servers, storage and networks. It can be also applied to nonphysical resources, including applications, middleware, distributed systems and even virtual resources themselves. The benefits of virtualisation vary depending on the customer’s objectives, the specific virtualisation technologies selected and the existing IT infrastructure. Not all customers obtain the same benefits from implementing a particular virtualisation solution.

Traditional resource virtualisation continues to be a major component in IBM’s on demand strategy. To continue its thrust toward "Innovation through Virtualisation", more virtualisation capability is required for creating virtual systems from multiple smaller systems and for managing these systems across platform and vendor boundaries in a simplified, cohesive way. Partitioning, encapsulation and isolation are some forms of virtualisation that enterprises are opting for.

How can a CIO take the advantage of IBM's server virtualisation solutions?

The use of virtualisation is a growing trend within datacentres. A key motivation for its use is to run more applications on a single server, making better use of its processing power while reducing the number of machines. Such efficiency means higher power to performance ratios and less money spent on cooling more servers. The virtualisation solutions enable companies to manage cross-system workloads using common systems management tools.

As more and more applications are coming in, the big question for CIOs is how to manage them. We have announced Project Big Green, our flagship initiative that will launch new products and services to sharply reduce datacentre energy consumption, helping the CIOs to transform their business and technology infrastructures into green investments. We will introduce the System x Server with embedded virtualisation technology and the company's latest chipset for Intel's quad-core Xeon processors. The System x3950 M2 server will include X4, the fourth-generation IBM's chipset for x86 servers. In addition, the new system will debut an embedded hypervisor, a virtualisation platform for running multiple operating systems on a host computer at the same time.

These solutions will help the CIOs reduce the problems related to energy and cooling and ultimately reduce their cost of operation.