Overview

Gartner says virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. The motivations for virtualization are many and varied, but the underlying business drivers, as with most well defined corporate initiatives, come down to reducing cost and increasing flexibility. In today’s rapidly changing business climate, doing it “better, cheaper, faster” is more than a mantra; it's a necessity. There is an expression in sports that “speed kills.” Feel free to now apply that cliché to IT operations. Without speed and agility your competition will pass you by. Guaranteed.

So how can virtualization help IT organizations do it “better, cheaper, faster”?

• Better - Virtualization streamlines disaster recovery and improves business continuity -- cutting downtime in the event of system failure from days to hours, or less.
• Cheaper - Virtualization optimizes hardware investments by eliminating and/or consolidating underutilized servers and storage.
• Faster - Virtualization enables the “instant provisioning” of new systems through the dynamic allocation of existing IT resources, without the need for additional hardware.

Finally, most servers and desktops today are in use only 8-15% of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power even when idle. So in addition to doing it better, cheaper and faster, virtualization promotes the concept of “green IT” by reducing energy use and CO2 output. According to VMware, virtualizing as few as 100 servers is the environmental equivalent of planting 2000 trees!

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