Description
Virtualization Today
Server virtualization now is a mainstream technology. Recent IDC surveys found that over 50% of all customers are employing server virtualization for production applications, including mission-critical applications such as supply chain management and enterprise resource planning. Within the next 12 months, these same users expect nearly half of their applications will be hosted on a virtualized server.
Server virtualization has enabled enterprises to harness the growing power of inexpensive computers and put a higher percentage of purchased capacity to use. An added benefit of virtualization is that organizations are also saving in terms of footprint and power and cooling costs within the datacenter. And server virtualization can also extend the life of data centers.
This first phase of virtualization which is primarily deployed for server consolidation is dramatically changing the economics of IT, simply by addressing capital costs. This phenomenon has influenced the adoption of other IT-changing technologies. IDC sees the rapid adoption of blade servers, for example, as proof. Organizations are combining blades in a chassis, then running virtualization software on top of those blades, consolidating and encapsulating multiple applications to drive up system utilization.
