In addition to material savings in terms of hardware, space and energy, virtualization offers a number of more intrinsic benefits, according to industry executives. "Companies are realizing that infrastructure and IT costs grow at an exponential rate compared to growth of company size—so IT costs become a critical factor to control," said HP's Vanderzweep. "Over that, you have the agility benefit. When a company wants to change business priorities, they can flow resources to where they are needed."
The ability to dynamically shift workloads between servers simplifies IT planning and increases the IT department's ability to quickly and efficiently meet unanticipated bandwidth demands. "It's not unusual for customers to have a server where the workload is growing faster than they originally thought when they bought the hardware," said Rymarczyk. "These customers then have to buy a bigger server and migrate the entire system to the new hardware—a pretty costly proposition in terms of labor, and [a project that] usually means a [service] outage that is not trivial."
Virtualization also makes the corporate IT team more efficient since it allows the ratio of servers-to-administrators to rise dramatically. "Typically, companies allocate about seven mission critical servers per administrator or 15 non-mission critical utility servers per administrator," said Vanderzweep. "Virtualization drives that ratio to double or triple, so that one administrator can handle 14 or 20 mission critical machines."
Hailey Lynne McKeefry of Professional Ink (www.professionalink.biz) is a freelance writer based in Belmont, Calif.
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