Executive Viewpoint: Keith Collins, SAS

By Keith Collins
published: Friday, December 05 2008

Virtualization has reinvented the way companies build and scale their IT programs. By freeing organizations from physical and geographical boundaries, virtual systems have helped companies reduce energy output, lower capital expenses and provide better desktop management, as well as increased security and improved disaster recovery processes. At SAS, we have avoided implementing 500 physical servers thanks to our partnership with VMware. But more importantly, now we'll be able to leverage virtualization clients to support R&D centers overseas, providing us with the ability to manage software development 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The next year will be an interesting one for the virtualization industry with what I see in three key areas - more application virtualization, adoption of virtual machine standardization and increased automation and management.

Applications will abound

Just like virtual machine users today don't know where their actual "machine" is physically executing, we will see the same move in the applications space.

Virtualization will become an even greater component to delivering software products in an ASP (application service provider) or SaaS (Software as a Service) environment. By using hosted software accessible through a Web browser, there is no longer a need to install megabytes of software on hard drives; applications are simply purchased or rented as they exist on the Internet. This is a major area of opportunity for SAS.

For those applications that remain internal to an organization, I believe virtualization will lead us toward using more internally-hosted, remote applications, thus driving down the need to have a lot of computing power sitting on a desktop. As a result, more and more users will no longer need "desktop" systems, but instead will have "kiosk" systems that just sit on top of a network of virtual applications, regardless of where they are hosted. Who knows? Maybe one day in the not-so-distant future desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Setting (much-needed) standards

Hardware will continue to be more specialized for virtual environments in 2009. First, you'll see more inclusion of hypervisors, or virtual machine managers, shipped right along with the hardware. Second, because there is now an assumption that the hardware will be used to run a virtualized environment, you will see changes to the configuration of shipped systems, including more memory, more network bandwidth and increased control over how the physical resources can be shared and partitioned at a much lower level.

However, what that may lead back to is "vendor lock-in," where customers a) have to choose the hardware systems based on what virtual machine format they want to run, or b) they choose the virtual machine format based on what hardware they've chosen. To avoid this scenario, we will see more expansion and adoption in the virtual machine standards space. With hardware performance continuing to improve, it's likely that we will see more emulation between the architecture that the virtual machine thinks it is running on and the actual underlying architecture of the physical hardware. If it doesn't happen in 2009, it is only a matter of time.

Counting the cost (savings)

2009 will usher in a greater focus on automation and management, both in terms of tactical and strategic virtualization, as well as a higher level of capacity planning and chargeback management.

We should see better movement and initial placement of virtual systems in 2009, which will increase efficiencies and lead to cost savings. With very limited-to-no human intervention, companies can refocus their IT staffs and resources to other projects if the virtual machines are completely automated.

Through increased capacity planning, IT managers are better able to predict utilization based on usage patterns, while still maintaining performance. It is extremely important to determine how many additional customers virtual systems can support and when to add more servers to the cloud.

So who pays for virtual systems? This will be an important question to answer in 2009 as virtualization technology increases in importance and acceptance. Since most IT resources are now in shared-services form, determining how to track virtualization usage, allocate costs and charge costs back to business units will be a challenge for IT managers but one they must address.

2009 should prove to be a ground-breaking year for virtualization and we are very excited to be a part of it.

VMware , SAS

All Executive Viewpoint Articles