How to cut costs and save the world
August 28, 2007

Over the past year, this website has devoted a lot of space to virtualization, underscoring our belief that this is one of those technologies that’s indispensable to the scale-out philosophy. We must be onto something, since a recent Dell whitepaper quoted IDC as saying that “server virtualization is now considered a mainstream technology among IT buyers.”

What accounts for the widespread adoption of a technology that not too long ago was seen as limited to test and development environments? Certainly the headache and complexity of managing server sprawl is a driver, albeit one that’s difficult to quantify.

But fewer servers brings a nice side benefit – less energy consumption. With the explosion of energy costs over the last year, enterprises have been hit hard with an expense that’s not hard to quantify—the monthly utility bills for running and cooling their IT systems. Managing energy use in the datacenter has moved from the back burner to become a hot topic.

The whitepaper points out that it’s quite typical for x86 servers to be running at less than 10 percent capacity—a number that screams for improvement if running an energy-efficient data center is even on your radar.

Even if you don’t think of yourself as green, you’ll blanche at IDC’s estimate that the power consumed to run and cool worldwide servers will total $45 billion by the end of the decade. Today, the bill is a measly $30 billion.

So what’s the bottom line with virtualization? Here’s a metric that's worth paying attention to: a VMware study of its customers indicates that a company running 1,000 servers in a virtualized environment could save $1.7 million over three years in power and cooling costs, plus an additional $5.8 million in hardware expenses.

As the whitepaper puts it, every workload that’s moved from a physical to a virtual server saves $560 in power and cooling costs. Apply that to the hundreds—or thousands—of workloads running in an enterprise’s datacenter and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

So, virtualization is no longer a virtual solution—it’s a real one that yields real benefits. If your enterprise cares about the bottom line, take a close look at today’s virtualization solutions. And the fact that you’ll be helping the environment while simplifying IT management—well, you’ll just have to deal with that.

Previous Blog Posts
11.07.07 - Scaling Out Strategically
08.28.07 - How to Cut Costs and Save the World
07.17.07 - Planting the Seeds for Datacenter Greenery
06.26.07 - Scale Out Zen — Do More with Less
06.14.07 - iSCSI...About to Go Mainstream?
05.30.07 - Is Your Data Center in a State of Quiet Desperation?
05.17.07 - EPA Data Center Guidelines: IT Power Use Is in the Spotlight
05.09.07 - Virtualized Data Needs Protection, Too
04.19.07 - Disaster Recovery on the Back Burner? Careful, It May Catch on Fire
04.10.07 - Professional Help for the Data Center
03.27.07 - Survey Shows Virtualization Taking Off
03.14.07 - Tackling Data Protection Alphabet Soup
03.07.07 - The Cost of Not Protecting Data
02.28.07 - Going Green to Conserve Energy in the Data Center
01.30.07 - Global Warming in the Data Center
12.02.06 - Open Standards Is for Systems Management Too
11.22.06 - Virtually Ready for Primetime
11.14.06 - Technology No Substitute for Communication
10.16.06 - Running a Data Center? What's Your Problem?