Issue 8, Feb/Mar 2010
FOCUS VITUALISATION UPDATE
VIRTUALISATION: very far from ’home and dry’
A combination of ongoing data center manager scepticism and possible lack of clarity around power requirements is still challenging its acceptance writes Nick Booth
A new study into market perception of the alleged benefits of virtualisation has shown that most data center managers polled are still very reluctant to virtualise any mission critical applications – with only 24% saying they have done so – while there remain unanswered issues around what a virtualised data center power set up would look like.
The research also underlines suspicions that what most enterprises seek from virtualisation – if it can be delivered – is the promise of cheap/controllable computing and reduced power consumption, rather than anything more ambitious in terms of innovative forms of application deployment.
It does need to be said that in this group, the number who saw virtualisation as an efficient money saver was very high – 97%. But as noted above, only a minority (nearly a quarter) expressed robust confidence in running mission critical applications on virtualised servers. More worryingly, a surprising 78% reported real-life application performance problems from using virtual hardware.
Plainly, to some extent data center managers remain unconvinced about virtualisation. Indeed, many seem to think the promised rewards of the technique are too good to be true.
Commenting on this particular study, Zohar Gilad, Executive VP at Precise Software (which commissioned the survey of 1,200 Oracle system users) at the Oracle Open World global user event in the US (October), clearly believes that the economic message of virtualisation is getting through and that buyers are satisfied that hardware costs, management time and money, and power bills could all be minimised this way.
But there remains suspicion that the stuff is still all a bit too ‘virtual’. “You know that uneasy feeling you get when you deal with a company that’s got no phone number, no contact details and no address for you to visit? That’s exactly the same response virtualisation can invoke,” Gilad says.
One of the biggest concerns is its end point, Gilad believes: “When projects escalate we could discover the limitations of virtualisation and its complementary technology, The Cloud. Contention for resources is one particular concern, for instance. The major worry is that if a problem occurs it will be difficult to get a holistic and accurate picture of the affected IT environment should the system go down if it’s a virtual model.”
There are constant changes in the topology that are done automatically by the system but if the system is down, data center managers seem to think they will be left on their own trying to pick up the pieces.
“It’s bad enough now, when big corporations have servers and routers in their network that nobody got around to documenting. In a physical network, there are all kinds of ghost machines and unaccounted software floating about that nobody dares touch in case it has an impact on the rest of the infrastructure. If you can’t keep up with the growth of a physical data center, what chance have you got with a virtual one?” Gilad asks.
Customer concerns such as those in this report do make sense, is the conclusion of observers. With a physical network you always have the option of unplugging a server and seeing who starts complaining; this is not an option with any kind of virtualised mission critical systems. So the ‘way forward’ for virtualisation and ultimately The Cloud should be to look at ways of reducing such fears and boost management capabilities?
Not necessarily, believe other parts of the data center industry: “We can’t even be certain about the power supply argument,” points out Michael Vaeth, who leads Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) business in EMEA as its Senior Vice President and General Manager. “Yes, data center virtualisation will lead to lower power consumption – but it will cause variability in power consumption.” That inconsistency could cause its own problems, he argued, and data center managers are sticklers for consistency.
The HDS position seems to be that while the
Zohar Gilad, Executive VP at Precise Software
Michael Vaeth, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Hitachi Data Systems
average data center footprint will be smaller with virtualisation, overall efficiency might still be sub-optimal. Why? While there will be fewer servers, each one will be more critical and will place a higher demand on storage resources than ever before, he argues. “With virtualisation, applications can be dynamically reallocated at will and the support infrastructure must be able to do the same,” he told DCD Focus.
“This year, expect to see demand for storage systems that can scale up and scale out,” predicts Vaeth – otherwise, data center managers of all ranges of scepticism won’t be able to meet the unexpected requirements of virtualisation.
“This capacity will have to be there in order to meet the increasing demands of faster networks, processors, and virtual operating systems like VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V,” said Vaeth. Data centers would need to scale up storage, adding more processing power, access ports, cache, and disk spindles for wide striping performance in order to meet the peak requirements of large server virtualisation, he warns.
2010 may not be the 'year of virtualisation' in the manner expected.
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