Virtualisation has a great deal more to offer than simply allaying the need for a company to replace its server infrastructure every couple of years, according to Bernard Tischendorf, sub-Sahara Africa systems engineering manager at Sun Microsystems.
“Virtualisation is one of the quickest ways for companies to get their data centre power consumption down, reduce their physical data centre size and lower their overall infrastructure management cost, in some cases by as much as half,” he says.
“By consolidating workloads onto less physical hardware through virtualisation, less power is needed to drive that hardware, less space is required and even less IT staff is needed,” Tischendorf adds.
While these benefits are generally a great starting point, they're nothing new, and Tischendorf believes few companies have realised just how deeply virtualisation reaches into a business's IT environment.
“Aside from server virtualisation, there's storage virtualisation, desktop virtualisation and application virtualisation, each as valuable as each other and the principles are very similar too.”
Sun went through the process of virtualising its own environment, and has managed to reduce the utility bills for its Santa Clara facility by 60% and earn over $1 million in rebates, according to Tischendorf.
“We believe virtualisation technology's time has come, and over the coming months, more and more companies will become serious about its implementation,” he concludes.
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