Opinion: Too many APAC businesses are missing out on virtualisation

By Max McLaren general manager, Red Hat A/NZ.

Red Hat integrates virtualisation into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system but plans to deliver a complete set of virtualisation solutions through its portfolio.

'In a 2008 survey of 3,000 organisations across Asia Pacific, less than 40 percent had adopted virtualisation and even then, only in non mission-critical areas or in development and test environments.

With cutting costs and saving jobs high on the global business agenda, too many APAC organisations are missing out on leveraging a technology that will help them drive capital and operational efficiencies in their data centres.

Research firm Gartner identifies virtualisation as top of the list when it comes to strategic technologies in 2009, with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise.

In many cases performance, security, scalability and management issues are hindering the widespread deployment of virtualisation across the enterprise.

Today, enterprises are increasingly realising that when it comes to virtualisation, they do have a choice.

Virtualisation that is integrated into the operating system enables the same physical hardware to be used to host both the operating system as well as virtual machines, dramatically improving efficiency in the data centre without compromising the performance of the bare metal applications.  

There is very clearly an opportunity for resellers to work with organisations on evaluating and implementing an effective virtualisation solution.

This involves identifying a comprehensive portfolio of server, client, and management products that allows the entire spectrum of enterprise workloads to run on one common infrastructure that is both manageable and secure.  

In addition, resellers should approach virtualisation with a view for the long term -- assisting organisations in laying the foundation of a flexible cloud computing environment that will enable them to, in the future, deploy any application, anywhere, at anytime.

That makes the choice of virtualisation technology an easy one -- one solution that is capable of the outstanding performance, scalability and agility inherent in open virtualisation.'