The UK government was this week accused of hiding behind private Cloud and placing too much emphasis on virtualisation by Marc Benioff, CEO of public Cloud enthusiast Salesforce.com. Benioff’s been arguing the case that virtualisation isn’t Cloud Computing for some time now, getting into a public spat with the market leader in this space, VMware.
If anyone in the UK is qualified to take a view on the role of virtualisation it’s Andy Tait, former Deputy Director of the G-Cloud programme within the Cabinet Office who upped sticks and took up a post as head of Public Sector for VMware. Tait has his own opinions on the different flavours of public sector Cloud options - private, public and hybrid:
When you have thousands and thousands of applications, it's natural to put an application on a piece of tin, he argues - but with utilisation of public sector server at under 10%, it is time to think about consolidation. Virtualisation is therefore the first step towards Cloud to his mind.
Up to a fifth of the services run by the UK's 2,000 public bodies are virtualised already, he estimates. Among local authorities the proportion runs as high as 40%, he adds. Despite that healthy ratio, it remains a slow process, made all the more so by long contracts which hamper quick change:
But the prize is worth having. Tait cites the London Borough of Camden saving £600,000 per year by virtualising its estate and says it did not have to buy any new systems as an example:
Hillingdon Council, another local government example he finds compelling, deployed a private Cloud having encountered problems with providing enough power to support its growing server estate. The authority virtualised 180 servers using VMware and reduced the physical server estate to just five. Hillingdon now runs 90% of its applications on virtual machines, the remaining 10% being legacy systems that will soon be reaching end of life.
Tait says it is perfectly possible to achieve a "15-fold" reduction in the number of servers required to run a data centre, with big savings in the cooling, racks and other plant and infrastructure as modern blade equipment removes plant and equipment overheads. Classic hardware virtualisation involves creating virtual systems run by a hypervisor and with automatic provisioning of new services.
Tait acknowledges that it is becoming a volume business likely to be superseded by Cloud services, but claims VMware is not resting on its laurels and is actively looking for new opportunities:
He also looks forward to a post-PC era in which users will consume their applications from any device, anywhere. In that scenario, organisations will have to regard every piece of data as dirty (unreliable) and make sure they carry out careful authentication. He concludes:
If the forthcoming national Cloud Computing strategy does have a heavy focus on virtualisation as many suspect, then VMware is well set up to make an even heftier play into the public sector – and Tait is set to be an even busier man than when he worked at the Cabinet Office.
