Virtualisation

• Beyond server consolidation
• Virtualising the desktop
• Mistakes and misconceptions
• Broader adoption
• Competitive landscape

Andrew Gifford, IMC Communications (AG): It's been 18 months or two years so existing customers are happy with the stability and flexibility. Our focus this year is to convince DR customers that they need to virtualise their production environments. Suddenly their virtual machines end up on our SAN in our DR centre. The next stage after that will be desktops.

BC: Do you still tell a server consolidation story to new customers?

CC: We're still leading with server consolidation, particularly in SMB where organisations have had a fairly eclectic approach to hardware purchasing. They can consolidate all of that into a single blade enclosure, virtualise their environment across it and there are real savings for a CIO or IT manager.

AG: Consolidation is an old sales angle but it still works. Telling them that their equipment can run at 80 per cent instead of 20 per cent just clicks in their heads because it's efficient.

Peter Hedges, IBM (PH): All the different aspects - whether it's DR, consolidation or virtual desktops - stem from one main business concern: whoever's in charge is responsible for supporting the business. Virtualisation provides greater control over the pressures these people are facing. In large companies it's often about consolidating because their IT is out of control and unmanageable. For others it might be the desktop that's the problem so VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] is the approach that grabs them. For smaller companies, it could be DR because this was something they weren't able to do when it meant lots of equipment and very fixed processes. For Flight Centre, it was about flexibility because the business was growing rapidly and virtualisation meant they were able to churn out the equipment for a new office in five hours rather than two and a half weeks.

TW: That's why it's more of a solution sale now rather than simply consolidation. We have some clients that are happy to run one to one on physical boxes because it gives them the flexibility in DR or detracts from the hardware layer. There are so many solutions we are now using it for that you can always find more opportunities in an existing client.

PH: We've come from a history of dropping in a new box because you want to deploy a new service but there are all these costs associated with the hardware installation. I have one conversation with CIOs - cost per application - and those costs are reduced through virtualisation. Virtualisation will become endemic and customers will start talking to resellers about cost per application. That will be the interesting metric going forward.

David Blackman, VMware (DB): Everybody has been going through considerable change and virtualisation is the technology for these times. Consolidation and containment has been the primary driver but there's so much more to it and it suits all sizes of company. We haven't even scratched the surface of opportunity yet.

RP: Server consolidation is the lead in but disaster recovery becomes the big discussion point second time around because it's so easy to shift entire servers around instantly.

AG: We find it very easy now to go into a company with 10-15 servers and virtualise everything. You get all the flexibility that goes with that and your DR is sorted. Tape is now a last resort rather than the only option.

TW: In SMB the first question you have to clarify is whether disaster recovery is offsite or within the site. A lot of the time, virtualisation provides them with the comfort that they can do it within their existing site.