A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days at the Midsize Enterprise Summit, an event that hosts a few hundred midsize business CIO’s and it was very obvious in my talks to many of the attendees that virtualization is absolutely top of mind in the midmarket.
How about you, are you thinking of doing so? Virtualization is also indicated to be one of the major technology investment areas for midsize businesses in 2008 based on some broader research that we have done over the past months and it’s no surprise when you consider the benefits.
Most servers are operating well below their capacity, some with utilization of only 10%, so it makes sense to pool them together into virtual machines. This delivers a considerable reduction in the number of servers needed, providing benefits on many fronts:
- There is the obvious reduction in equipment expenses
- Long term operating expenses also go down due to the management overhead savings
- In some cases we’ve seen as much as a 10 to 1 reduction in server provisioning time (physical vs virtual)
- Average power and cooling cost for a single processor are US$800 per year, so reducing them continuously adds to the bottom line over time
In many cases the savings in total cost of ownership can easily outweigh the cost of virtualization software.
Is this your experience? What benefits have you seen from consolidation using virtualization technology?
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