Citrix hails the year of the virtual desktop
By Leslie Faughnan
Virtualisation is now ubiquitous, but organisations are still going through various phases of adoption and are at different points along the virtualisation road, said Dr Ian Pratt of Citrix Systems.
He is vice-president of advanced virtualisation products and an acknowledged leader in the industry as the father of Xen open source virtualisation technology and founder of Xensource, acquired by Citrix in 2007. He acknowledged that the primary initial driver for virtualisation in most organisations was server consolidation.
“Cut costs, cut what many IT people rightly called’ craplication’ and move on to a better way of running your data centre,” said Pratt.
“A few years ago, that was how virtualisation got its momentum in the market, with added benefits in security and disaster recovery.
“Today, some organisations are already at what we see as the third stage, making more use of automation and autonomic tools. This is all still emerging, with a lot of process that formerly had to be manual now being coded and automated. The management system is capable of making system decisions like moving VMs [virtual machines], powering them on and off and integrating with high-end storage, moving automatically between different grades of storage.
“That kind of high-end, high-level automation is not yet widely adopted but we are undoubtedly going to see more and more of it,” Pratt said.” The benefits are potentially huge, but many organisations will ask when we can learn to trust it. But it is clear that bigger, better resourced organisations will soon start to take the safety catches off.
“In the virtualised environment, what is done can almost always be rolled back and undone if necessary. That is, after all, one of its almost standard benefits, which is why it is so suitable for testing in the most realistic simulations we have yet devised.”
Once people have got over the physical hurdles, meaning our traditional modes of thinking about computers, Pratt said they could start to think in terms of managing computing rather than our virtualisation of it.’
‘When everything is essentially virtual and logical, the thinking moves on to how much of those resources, that infrastructure, we really need to own?”
Pratt sees instead more practical steps involving service providers and virtual private servers [VPS], already established in the marketplace, and the virtual private data centre at an even higher level of service.
“I believe this is going to be a very important trend.
You could have, say, 20 VMs, your own firewalls, network load balancing, in fact exactly the same level of control and most of the same tools as in your own data centre or Wan.
“We are already talking about ‘infrastructure as a service’ to complement SaaS and online storage and back-up,” Pratt said.
“The virtual private data centre could combine the best features of all of those and I fully expect it to take off in a big way. It will probably be led by the smaller guys, who can see the benefits and who are less constrained by legacy thinking.”
He accepted that there were still many legal and governance issues with the public cloud, especially for regulated organisations, that will be resolved in time. But many smaller private enterprises are free to reap the benefits right now.
This year, Pratt said, would be the year of the virtual desktop. There are several proven technologies to deliver it depending on the user’s role and range of applications.” But the fact is that you can have everything that PC under the desk gives you, but actually coming from a VM somewhere to whatever screen or device is convenient.”
