Virtualisation is a hot topic, and a priority for IT budgets in 2010. Virtualisation is fairly well-established, but there is still room for the market to grow. It has many advantages and this is the main reason why it is so popular in companies of all sizes.
Virtualisation is being used as a tool for consolidation, a means to reduce space and power requirements, and more recently as a way to bring business continuity to a larger part of an organisation's IT infrastructure. It is becoming an important technology across the IT environment. The technology is rapidly being deployed in server, storage, networking, as well as client environments.
In fact, the recent slowdown and consequent focus on cost optimisation has made organisations look at virtualisation to help them improve their bottom lines and reduce their IT hardware costs. Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice-President, Citrix, India Sub-continent, says that virtualisation can be looked at from three aspects — Application, Server and Desktop Virtualisation. The total global server, desktop and application virtualisation technologies market, has been estimated by John Humphreys, Program Vice-President, IDC, to be $3.4 billion by 2011.
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Industry experts estimate that up to 30 million office workers will move to virtual desktops over the next five years, creating a new $1 billion market for desktop virtualisation.
Starting with application virtualisation, the industry is now moving the application into the data centre and delivering the same over the network to remote workers. Since there are no transactions or processes happening at the end device security is high.
Mr. Deshmukh says that BFSI (banking financial services and insurance) and BPO (business process outsourcing) sectors are the early adopters of desktop virtualisation.
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On the future of desktop virtualisation, he says Citrix believes that the next generation of desktop virtualisation will encompass two important advances in desktop technology: desktop as a service (DaaS) and client-side virtualisation.
Today industry is looking at both integrated and end-to-end virtualisation, since it provides more availability, reduced downtime, and improved disaster recovery. It also improves data protection for hosts and virtual machines.