If anything, our previous three weeks' columns on virtualisation should have done an adequate job of shedding some light on the benefits and potential pitfalls of virtualisation.
And we hope you have come away with positive sentiment towards this relatively new and exciting phenomenon.
Time and again, virtualisation is proving to be the way IT departments are managing to use less infrastructure to achieve better results for the business.
In fact, in most cases it's allowing IT departments to make their budgets stretch further than ever before.
It stands to reason that if an organisation begins its virtualisation project with the goal of using its existing infrastructure better, the organisation can expect to see a reduction in the volume of new hardware purchased.
'Old-school' computing models prescribed that every application or service required its own server and storage system; and in many cases, those applications or services weren't even remotely capable of using the resources they were afforded efficiently - that meant, there was a great deal of unused resource simply sitting around the data centre.
Virtualisation will allow the business to begin using that idle resource once again. In the same right, some of the business's more demanding applications could just as well have been afforded too little resource to be operating efficiently.
By virtualising onto existing hardware, the IT shop is able to make better use of all of the company's hardware, allocating more resource to applications that require it, and less to those that aren't quite as demanding.
And even though that might not result in a huge saving in electricity at the outset, that fact that many businesses are able to power certain of their servers off for large portions of the month and only keep them running in times of peak load, will undoubtedly see power consumption in the data centre drop.
With power costs said to be drawing close to rivalling the physical cost of hardware in the data centre annually, these savings are an obvious boon.
Lastly, because virtualised environments tend to make better use of the hardware placed at their disposal and are so open to reconfiguration and redeployment of resource, they generally take a smaller staff complement to run efficiently.
There's no doubt that virtualisaton is a brave new world for most vendors and their customers - with benefits such as these on offer; however, there can surely be no doubt that it will continue to be relevant in the coming months and years.
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