In-Built Virtualisation: Is It Changing The Market?

According to Gartner, worldwide virtualisation software revenue will increase 43 percent in 2009 as against 2008. In a bid for lower TCO and increased agility, organisations world over are adopting virtualisation. Though as a technology virtualisation has been a topic of debate for almost a decade now; it has metamorphosed over time from an elitist technology, which could be bought only from a proprietary vendor to a technology, which is now integrated in the open source platform.

With Ubuntu offering in-built cloud capabilities, Biztech2.0 decided to explore in-built cloud offerings by different open source vendors and how this might change the dynamics of the market in the months to come.

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The aim

Are in-built virtualisation offerings merely about commoditisation from a vendor perspective? Ravi Ranade, head, Global Services System, Red Hat, which introduced virtualisation capabilities two years back, says, “We wanted to commoditise the market. But having said that, Linux’s growth has not been about numbers or revenue. As it has been developed by a community, it has always been focused towards what the user wants. Community represents the same customer, who is perhaps buying open source technology. Even proprietary vendors are making virtualisation (hypervisors), a part of their OS. It is a natural evolution rather than a strategy against a particular proprietary vendor.”

Has the entry of open source players in the virtualisation space really changed the market dynamics? Does it mean the battles has shifted to proprietary v/s open source? Sandeep Menon, country head, Novell, says, “What open source did when it started integrating and shipping hypervisor-based virtualisation is that it made the market wide open. It would come bundled in the Linux operating system. And what Linux did was completely in line with the ethos of the open source business. It is not just virtualisation but a whole lot of utilities and software that get bundled into it. The entire model is based on the fact that software is available for you to use and then it is a services-based model. This is exactly what is done with virtualisation; as in we have developed the hypervisor and then the hypervisor has been commoditised. That commoditisation made the market explode. Also, at the server hardware level, you have most servers running at 20-30 percent hardware utilisation. That forms the background for virtualisation explosion.”

UNIX To Linux?

A lot of enterprises are moving from UNIX to Linux. Could this be a reflection of the effort on the part of open source vendors to migrate enterprises from UNIX to Linux? Menon says, “It is happening as a progression as Linux as an operating system has a look, feel, architecture and commands that are very UNIX like. It offers the same robustness and reliability that UNIX used to give earlier. Customers wanted to consider the option of an x86 platform running Linux, giving them a similar degree of reliability and robustness. And that has been driving the UNIX to Linux migration. In terms of virtualisation consolidation, the move is seen from both Windows and Linux.”

With global virtualisation penetration set to reach 20 percent in 2009 from a mere 12 percent in 2008, it is customers who will have to choose one technology over the other and not get caught in ideological wars. On the other hand, it is the vendor’s job to co-exist in a multi-OS environment and to not push the customer into one corner.