Virtualization & Open Source in India

The Indian IT market is estimated to touch $65 billion by 2009, posting a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent. The market, on the back of strong demand over the past few years, has emerged as the fastest-growing one in the Asia Pacific region.IDC India Limited, an IT industry analyst firm, has predicted that the year 2007 will witness Indian enterprises graduate to the second level of Dynamic IT infrastructure – where IT infrastructure can effect changes fast in response to the changing business scenario. The key technology components to attain this state are virtualization, SOA and application integration. CIO India examines the impact of open source & virtualization.

.......What has caused the effective price of virtualization to head toward zero -- and how? In contrast to many who seem to feel that open source and proprietary software operate in two parallel but separate universes — that open source is used by people who can’t afford ‘real’ software, while proprietary commercial software is for organizations that need reliability, scalability, and all the other ‘abilities’ — I believe that open source is already challenging the proprietary software world.

How about a case study to test the theory? Let’s look at virtualization, something that has tremendous potential with a clear payoff: reduced costs for IT organizations, both hard (power, machines) and soft (admin and operations personnel). It evinces an undeniable fact: machines are improving so fast that they make possible a change to the traditional hardware infrastructure, breaking the bounds of the one machine, one application practice used by most IT shops....

Read on.