Spiraling real estate costs, need for optimisation of resources, rapid data growth and rising energy costs are some of the factors that are driving the adoption of virtualisation technologies in India. At the event ‘Biztech2.0 IT Leaders Power Breakfast Series: Transforming the Data Centre into a Delivery Centre’ organised by Biztech2.0 in collaboration with Citrix, leading Indian CIOs from various industry verticals discussed a plethora of issues surrounding virtualisation and various methods to help create a successful virtualised environment.

Virtualisation is a technology that attempts to transform an organisation’s data centre into a delivery centre by enabling application delivery that is efficient, cost-effective and enhances the customer experience. The IT Leaders Power Breakfast was attended by Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications, M.V. Shreeram, GM-IT(Marketing), HPCL, Ashis Kumar Saha, asst. GM, dept. of IT, Air India, Zoeb Adenwala, CIO, Essel Propack, Rohit Ambosta, head-NCG, Financial Technologies, Shirish Gariba, CIO, Elbee Express, Ompal Chadha, asso. VP, Spanco, Sanjeev Sreedharan, VP-Software Engineering, Cleartrip and Suresh Shan, national head-BITS, Mahindra Finance, amongst others.

Zoeb Adenwala, CIO, Essel Propack stated that the problem that he faced was consolidating infrastructure that was spread across the globe."We managed to run all the necessary applications by deploying three blade servers and VMware’s virtualisation software as compared to about 25 servers required, sans virtualisation," he added. Other CIOs related their individual experiences around virtualisation, with a majority being concerned about the management of virtualised infrastructure.

Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications opined, "In an environment where we run over 1500 servers, management of a virtualised environment becomes very unwieldy. A major reason of this is that the software for virtualised infrastructure management has not matured to the point that it can handle a server farm of this size." Rohit Ambosta, head-NCG, Financial Technologies and Shridhar Rane, associate director-technology, Barclays Wealth, both explained that they utilised virtualisation technologies on their testbeds but had not ported it to use in their production environments.

Over the course of the discussion, these CIOs covered a numbers of issues integral to the successful implementation of virtualisation, which included dealing with the increasing complexity, integrating with legacy systems, security and implementation best practices.

After having discussed implementations ranging from single digit servers to server farms, the prevailing sentiment amongst the majority of CIOs was that the technology was mature for mission-critical deployment in environments with a limited number of servers. In the case of larger data centres, the complexity of managing the virtualised infrastructure outweighed its benefits, until the technology matures to overcome these issues.