Virtualization is growing fast, and providing real benefits, but it might create an impression of lower efficiency, according to speakers at an event launching Singapore Datacenter Week 2015 (SDCW 2015), a week of events planned for 14 to 17 September in Singapore, which will include a DCD Converged conference.
Data centers are shifting inexorably towards virtualized servers inside the company, increasingly deployed as a private cloud, said Franck Petit, the Southeast Asia regional manager of DCD Group. There is also a steady growth to virtualized systems outside of the company, or public cloud services, he told the SDCW launch meeting, at the Suntec City Convention Center in May.
Virtualized systems and private cloud deployments grew slightly from 15 percent in 2014 to 17 percent, according to global figures from DCD Intelligence, Petit said. Meanwhile, the percentage of virtualized systems that are hosted externally grew from 10 to 12 percent. The shift looks set to accelerate in coming years, and virtualization and the cloud is emerging as the second top driver for data center investments.
Virtual pressures?
Virtualization is also causing issues for measuring data center efficiency. While saving money, and energy, virtualization could ironically result in a worse value for the figure normally used ot measure data center efficiency, PUE (power usage effectiveness), the event heard.
One of the main goals of virtualization is to run compute infrastructure at the highest utilization possible, which typically means increased energy consumption, and heat generated, pointed out Ed Ansett, chairman of i3 Solutions Group.
Speaking in a panel session which invited IT executives and data center experts to share their thoughts about the role of enterprise IT workloads and their impact on the data center, Ansett outlined the opportunity to tweak the software stack and achieve substantial improvements in energy consumption in the data center.
As he has previously told DatacenterDynamics, a software task using 10W of power could require as much as 32W from the power utility company, thanks to cumulative overheads.
Other panelists including Manik Narayan Saha, CIO of SAP, and Abhishek Parolkar, head of technology at the popular local web portal PropertyGuru, also discussed the difference between container technology, traditional virtualization, and private cloud deployments. The answer according to the experts: The former offers ample opportunity to further increase efficiency, though with less flexibility than is offered by virtualization.
As the topics of private and hybrid cloud develop they are marrying the manageability and efficiency of cloud together with the control of on-premises infrastructure, an area that will be covered in depth by the new StackingIT track that will be introduced in the upcoming DCD Converged conference that will be held at Marina Bay Sands Singapore alongside Singapore Datacenter Week on September 15 and 16. You can obtain more information about the conference here.