The recent growth of virtualization in the Asia-Pacific region cannot be overlooked. Virtualization market in India is worth USD 38.8 Mn. and is expected to increase at a CAGR of 47% by 2014. Statistics show that end-users want to switch to virtualization within the next few years. Cost saving is one of the immediate advantages that is attracting people to the concept of the virtualization.

In India, the Server Virtualization adoption level is 19.6%. The benefits of server virtualization are not debatable. Indian businesses are definitely in agreement with this technology. Server virtualization comes as the most prominent server-related trend and key investment area for 2012. This is largely compounded by server virtualization's benefits like savings on space and power fronts.

Cost savings are clearly the driving factor for adoption of server virtualization solutions in India. Interestingly, Indian businesses are also testing server virtualization for disaster recovery (DR) or high-availability scenarios. The cost benefits and ease of management when implementing DR on virtual server infrastructure is clearly driving this trend.

Since a single physical server can accommodate multiple virtual servers, most Indian organizations are enticed by the huge savings in terms of space and hardware. Adding to these benefits is the automatic reduction in power required to cool these servers. As a result, power saving is one of the topmost factors driving virtualization, considering the dearth of power in most parts of India.  

However, Indian businesses are still testing the waters, since mission critical applications (like ERP) are not being deployed on virtual servers. Organizations prefer to assess the performance of non-mission critical applications on virtual servers before running mission critical apps on such infrastructure. Indian organizations determine the hardware platform for server virtualization using various parameters. Long term growth and hardware scalability should clearly take priority in such assessments.

The growth of Desktop virtualization is going to get noticeable in the coming few years. There are a number of reasons to substantiate this trend. The first is, of course, the overall level of confidence in virtualization, coupled with the desire of customers to reduce operating costs and ensure the work of the expanding range of mobile users. However, it should be noted that desktop virtualization is a more complicated than server virtualization. In many aspects of virtualization, personal systems are much more complex than servers. And it can be seen even by the fact that the issue of desktop virtualization involves several different (often overlapping) organizational and technical areas. 

Data center infrastructure shifts are often both dramatic and unpredictable until they are well under way. Virtualization and cloud computing are together redesigning the landscape of the data center. This is not a zero sum game, however. Not all data centers will shoot their data into the cloud. The client/server architecture followed and eventually eclipsed the mainframe, and it is not hard to imagine cloud doing the same thing. Perhaps the key proof-point of the winds of change though is the infrastructure that is building up around cloud. Virtualization vendors are hitching their virtualization wagon firmly to the cloud.

One thing to bear in mind, however, is that although virtualization and cloud are often tied together, they are not necessarily fused.

A mix of natural disasters, political upheaval and financial crisis in 2011 has prompted companies to plan for 2012 against a backdrop of economic turmoil and great uncertainty.

However, in certain areas of business, there are still some absolute certainties. One such area is that of data storage and storage infrastructure, for which demand will undoubtedly intensify in the year ahead, continuing the trend in recent years of exponential growth.

• Storage efficiency: There will be a greater focus on storage efficiency technologies such as storage virtualization, dynamic or thin provisioning.
  
  

• Consolidation to convergence: Consolidation will give way to convergence. Over the past few years IT has focused on consolidation and much of the low-hanging fruit has now been consolidated. In order to gain further cost savings, the focus will be on convergence of server, storage, networks, and applications.
  
  

• Big Data: The explosion of unstructured data and mobile applications will generate a huge opportunity for the creation of business value, competitive advantage, and decision support if this data can be managed and accessed efficiently.
  
  

• Storage scaling: Server and desktop virtualization will increase the need for enterprises to scale up storage systems, non-disruptively as physical server demands increase. 

• Next-stage Virtualization – What should be virtualised now?
  

• How are businesses using virtualization?
  

• Market trends and opportunities.
  

• Who does virtualization really benefit?
  

• How can enterprises adopt virtualization technologies to address real business problems?
  

• Is virtualization just another consolidation technology?
  

• The impact of cloud computing on Virtualization.
  

• Virtualization & Cloud Computing – What’s new for a CIO?
  

• Best practices in cost optimization, managing escalating energy costs, the ageing infrastructure, disaster recovery, flexibility, agility and much more with Virtualization.