BANGALORE, INDIA: Virtualization has clearly emerged as one of the hottest technology with wide reaching implications in the global as well as Indian market scenario. Businesses across IT/ITeS were the few early adopters of consolidation and virtualization in India.

The success received by this technology has now triggered the momentum of its adoption in industries like BFSI and manufacturing also. While globally, only about 4-5 per cent of servers are virtualized, the market is now set to ramp up to reach 90 per cent in the next three-five years.

Nischay Anikar, escalation engineer, platforms team, Microsoft India GTSC, talks more about virtualization in an interview with CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is driving this large scale adoption and why?

Nischay Anikar: Apart from acknowledging the primary advantages of virtualization technology (like improved management capabilities and better IT infrastructure utilization), enterprises in India are fast picking up on its additional benefits like savings in power consumption and improved investment in physical office space.

Globally, while server virtualization has established itself – storage virtualization is fast emerging as a key technology trend in the Indian environment as well.

The key benefits of virtualization that are driving the growth of this technology in the market today are:

Reduced TCO: Power reduction, physical space reduction, accelerated server provisions/consolidation and quick ROI.

Increased availability: Simplified backup and recovery, business continuity built-into model and dynamic provisioning

Enabling dynamic IT: Transformation of physical IT infrastructure into logical layers with policy based management that enables self managing dynamic systems.

Even the small and medium business customers have benefited from virtualization deployment, as they can now reduce the cost of hardware to run multiple systems with different roles.

CIOL: What and all can be virtualized?

NA: Virtualization can be applied across enterprise scenarios in the following ways:

Server virtualization creates a separate Operating System environment that is logically isolated from the host server, and isolates each instance of the OS running on the same physical server. This allows greater density of resource use (hardware, utilities and space) while providing operational isolation and security.

Desktop virtualization creates a separate OS environment on the desktop, allowing a non-compatible legacy or Line of Business application to operate within a more current desktop operating system.

Application virtualization separates the application configuration layer from the OS in a desktop environment, reducing application conflicts, bringing path and upgrade management to a central and accelerating the deployment of new applications and updates.