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EMC: Virtualisation is ready for big apps

Jason Hiner Tech Republic

Published: 22 May 2009 16:20 BST

Typically, when IT departments decide to use virtualisation in the datacentre, the big question is which workloads to virtualise. The conventional wisdom has been to avoid virtualising anything that is too I/O-intensive, such as databases and email systems.

However, EMC wants to put that idea to rest. The company, which owns virtualisation market leader VMware, spent a lot of time at EMC World 2009 driving home the point to IT professionals that the entire datacentre can be virtualised.

"Virtualisation is now ready to run the biggest applications," said EMC chief technology officer Chuck Hollis on Wednesday. "It's ready for the biggest applications today."

In fact, Hollis said that virtualisation is already running a lot of the biggest applications for many of the world's largest companies. He gave America's top carmakers as an example: driven by intense economic pressures to reduce costs, carmakers have recently accelerated their adoption of virtualisation.

Another industry that is extensively using virtualisation is oil and gas, which has to deliver the same enterprise applications to both desktops and supercomputers. This industry also has a wide diversity of sites across the globe that need access to these applications. As a result, it has embraced virtualisation to get the kind of flexibility it needs on the backend.

EMC is committed to eventually moving its entire internal server infrastructure to virtualisation, but chief executive Joe Tucci said in his keynote on Monday that the company is not even halfway there yet. That said, Hollis noted that EMC is working on major virtualisation projects. "We put big, hairy Oracle and Exchange workloads on VMware," he said.

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There are some companies that have taken the plunge and virtualised 100 percent of their datacentre. Hollis remarked: "We work with outsourcers that are now completely virtualised."

In some cases, it is happening very quietly in the background. Hollis told the story of an IT manager who had virtualised over 3,000 servers. Hollis asked him: "How did you get your users to accept this?" The IT manager smiled and replied: "I didn't tell them." Apparently, no-one noticed.

This situation is what EMC believes will happen in nearly all cases, when virtualisation is deployed correctly. Meanwhile, virtualisation gives IT departments a lot more flexibility in managing a company's technology infrastructure.

Hollis said the new premise of virtualisation is "architecting for choice". He compared virtualisation to a shipping container for server workloads.

EMC is also trying to make the case that building a virtualisation infrastructure inside the firewall will enable companies to create an "internal cloud" now, and take better advantage of the opportunities presented by cloud computing ("external cloud") in the future.

For this concept to really take off, it would be likely to require standardisation and co-operation among the various enterprise vendors, including EMC, Dell, IBM, Oracle, HP, Microsoft and Citrix. It would require more than just compatible hypervisors in the virtualisation layer.

That kind of collaboration is probably unlikely. EMC is one of the more open collaborators in that group, and even that company shows no interest in approaching its rivals.

Hollis said that VMware currently owns 97 percent of the virtualisation market, so he argues that it is the de facto standard.

While there is some truth to that, it is difficult to imagine that the virtualisation market will not be a lot more crowded in the years ahead, because so many of the companies listed above are putting such emphasis on it — especially since it can now handle virtually any type of server load.

Credit: EMC says virtualisation is now ready to run the world's biggest apps from TechRepublic.com