The virtualisation journey to 2020

By 2020, it will be hard to find a data centre that isn’t 100% virtualised.

Virtualisation has proven to be one of the most transformative technologies for business in computing history. While it’s possible to argue that virtualisation as a concept debuted back in the 1960s, its rapid growth over the last decade has made it the de facto approach to the establishment of a modern data centre.

Back in 2010, Gartner estimated that 25% of enterprise data centres would be running virtual workloads at the end of that year. At the time, Philip Daws, research vice president at Gartner, said, “Virtualisation will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge.”

According to Gartner, virtual server OS instances comprised 71% of total server OS instances installed in 2014, and this is predicted to reach 82% by 2018. It is widely expected within the technology industry that this will climb to over 90% by 2020.

The business benefit of deploying virtualisation is the fact that it’s impossible to achieve a certain level of technology resiliency without doing so. Everything from self-deployment, fast and robust backups, enhanced off-site options, and operational efficiencies are achieved via today’s generation of virtualisation platforms.

Since 2010, the IT industry has traversed a path from virtualisation running in the background, managing the workload and delivery of a small number of apps and business operations, through to becoming a core component of the modern data centre.

Today, many businesses rely on a virtualisation-first approach, where data centres are predominantly designed around virtualised solutions. In five years, we can expect this to shift to a ‘virtualisation only’ model, where businesses are designed from the ground up with scalability, flexibility and performance in mind.

Virtualised data centres achieve efficiencies in heating, cooling and power usage, enabling a business to provide services at scale and manage workloads too, which is becoming increasingly critical in the modern business.

As organisations have come to rely increasingly on IT and every moment of downtime can cost hundreds through to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, virtualisation solutions have grown to become a critical part of business operations.

Customers in ANZ have traditionally been early adopters of virtualisation technologies, and today it’s not uncommon to see deployments of up to 30 virtual machines on one dedicated piece of hardware.

Cloud ubiquity

Today, cloud-based services are widely deployed across a large number of businesses, from SMBs to large enterprises. Microsoft has moved to subscription models for its software packages, including Microsoft Office 365, following the lead established by the pure SaaS-oriented companies such as Salesforce.

SaaS has been one of the biggest revolutions in business (and even consumer) IT over the past decade, and has been driven by the push towards virtualisation, and the emergence of an ‘outsourced CIO’ model, where MSPs manage the day-to-day application delivery and backup/recovery operations on behalf of a business.

Looking ahead to 2020, it will be hard to find a data centre that isn’t 100% virtualised. Over the next few years, new application models will fundamentally change the data centre. For example, more critical (and non-critical) applications will move to a cloud model to enable the ‘always-on enterprise’ to provide employees and customers with services that scale.

Furthermore — and this is a trend we’re already seeing — serious investments in availability are becoming more welcome in discussions between IT departments and the C-suite. While modern business managers understand that if the data centre is down, their business is down, there’s still a lack of knowledge in how to address the criticality of availability.

Over the next few years, IT leaders within businesses will be able to drive discussions around what needs to happen to give new options of near-constant availability. The precise solution will vary from business to business, but should examine whether the investment required for a disaster recovery site is justified, or whether a cloud strategy would be more desirable.

There is no clear-cut virtualisation approach that works for every business, but as virtualised data centres become the norm, there are a number of options that the modern IT professional will need to be able to understand and argue the pros and cons of to business leaders.

The convenience and scalability offered by cloud-based, virtualisation-powered SaaS products over the last five years has affected customer and employee expectations. An increasingly significant differentiator for modern businesses is being able to provide a responsive, cohesive customer experience across every touch point.

User-centric design and service delivery can only be achieved if every interaction that an employee or customer has is consistent, with access to data in real time.

In the not-too-distant future, the expectation of both customers and businesses alike will be a consistent and seamless experience regardless of device or location.

By swapping to a suite of applications designed to make the most of a virtualised environment, businesses will be able to elevate availability and service levels and better meet customer, partner and employee expectations.