Digital Archiving Systems (DAS), a provider of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, using server virtualisation to lower its operating costs and optimise its resources.
According to DAS, server virtualisation is making high-end computing more affordable by allowing companies to do more with less hardware than they needed in the past.
Ronald Melmed, MD of DAS says, "There's a strong worldwide trend towards server virtualisation as companies try to cut back on running costs in their data centres in a tight economy."
Server virtualisation basically abstracts applications and operating systems from the actual server, so that more than one set of applications can be run on one system. Virtualised servers in a cluster can be managed as a single pool of processing power, Melmed explains.
He says server virtualisation is growing globally. "According to market researcher, Forrester, more than a third of enterprise IT shops have implemented x86 server virtualisation and nearly two-thirds expect to do so by 2009," he says.
Melmed adds that a recent study by IDC found that 35% of the servers bought in 2007 in Europe were virtualised and forecasts that 52% of the servers purchased in 2008 will be virtualised.
"From DAS' point of view, one immediate benefit of virtualisation is that it allows us to optimise use of our existing hardware and cut back on the need to buy new servers," says Melmed. "Apart from the benefit of achieving cost-savings on hardware purchases, we can contain spending on cooling and power, which have become a major expense in any data centre."
Estimates about average server utilisation in non-virtualised environments range between 10% and 20%. Virtualisation allows companies to boost that number to 75% or more, allowing them to do more using the same energy profile. Server virtualisation also allows companies to optimise use of resources such as network bandwidth and storage space.
Share