Ready or Not: Virtualization is Coming

As you might guess, we spend a lot of time looking at current marketing trends and what types of technologies and products our customers will need over the next 24 to 36 months.  Many of our customers at Canadian Web Hosting (www.canadianwebhosting.com) have seen our continued expansion into virtualization and cloud web hosting solutions.  While the reason for this are not difficult to understand, sometimes it can be helpful to see numbers and trends behind these decisions and to see where your competitors might be heading.

In looking at these changes, the significant cost, power and efficiency advantages of virtualization have helped push the cloud into the enterprise and many companies are moving their existing IT infrastructures into that cloud which now stands at 38.9% penetration.

One of my favourite reference tools is the V-index, a free resource that is updated every quarter on www.V-index.com that gives you clear and concise data that represents where the enterprise market is heading.  This is important as most “enterprise” grade solutions trickle down to the small and medium size business’ as the platforms mature.  What is the V-index?  The V-index tracks the penetration of virtualization across the server requirements of large-scale enterprises in the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany and the aim is to give end-users an ongoing snapshot of the penetration rate of virtualization, thereby the user can deduct trends and issues that may affect its adoption.

As you start to look at the data, the first thing that pops out is that 75 percent of organizations are discussing private and hybrid cloud deployments.  More importantly, many of these same organizations are looking at moving “business-critical” initiatives to virtual computing environments.  This shows the continuing adoption and trust of the cloud platform as a critical business decision.  In a recent Symantec Cloud survey,  many organizations stated that they are leveraging virtualization for business-critical applications. Of enterprises that are implementing virtualization, more than half (59 percent) plan to virtualize database applications in the next 12 months. Fifty-five percent plan to virtualize Web applications, and 47 percent plan to virtualize email and calendar applications. Forty-one percent plan to virtualize ERP applications.  This is significant because it shows an increasing comfort in putting critical data including ERP solutions into the cloud.  Canadian Web Hosting has seen this trend and is part of the reason we continue to expand our cloud solutions to include the build in governance and redundancies to protect that data.

As virtualization and cloud technologies are increasingly adopted, the cost and performance of these services is front and center.  In a recent example from the Cloud Usage Index, 82 percent of companies said that the cloud has helped reduce their IT costs.  As a comparison, Symantec’s cloud survey also showed that more than half of the respondents (56 percent) said storage costs somewhat increased with server virtualization, but during the process of virtualizing storage, those same companies found that cloud deployment reduced operating expenses (55 percent of respondents), improved storage performance (54 percent of respondents) and improved disaster recovery readiness (53 percent of respondents).

In looking at the cloud and the types of solutions available, there is one very significant point to be made.  When we talk about shared hosting, or dedicated servers, these are hosting plans that have a defined meaning that you know exactly what you are getting.  A good example of this is dedicated server hosting.  With servers, you know exactly what you are getting both from a resource and service standpoint.  There are not different flavours of dedicated servers outside of different manufacturers. With the cloud and virtualization, the same cannot be said.  When you look at the cloud today, we have a better idea of what the cloud is but we still have challenges defining exactly what it is.  One person sees it as a technology, another person sees it as a general way of doing things, a third person sees it as a capability.  Another way to view it is that the cloud today provides a set of communities, conversations, commitments, and projects that are always changing every day.  As an example, our Canadian Web Hosting customers who utilize our cloud services, ranging from Hyper-V, Xen and VMware, represents a community that has many different service requirements but have certain commitments and conversations that are specific to Canada.  This can range from meeting Canadian privacy and security requirements,  to needing a failover service that leverages a multi-site cloud.  It represents a highly elastic, scalable set of tools and technologies that give end-users flexibility.

Because of the ongoing focus on communities and conversations, there is an ever-present challenge that exists throughout the cloud platform and service providers.  Even with our adoption of VMware, Hyper-V, Xen and Joyent platforms, we continue to see a lack of “cloud” standardization, or what a recent article on the Cloudline Blog on Wired.com suggests that because of customers specific needs, we are in fact disparate communities.  Recently, I’ve seen a few blogs out there suggesting that 2012 might be the year that standardization becomes increasingly adopted.  For the end-user, this means that standards will be defined including API standards, resource behaviour standards, thereby giving developers the ability to start writing applications and workloads that can run across public clouds but still meet the communities “local” requirements.